Teachability of Reflective Processes in Written Composition

COGNITIVE
SCIENCE
8,
173-190
(1984)
Teachability of Reflective Processes
in Written Composition
MARLENE SCARDAMALIA
York University, Ontario
CARL BEREITERANDROSANNE STEINBACH
The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Reflective
thought,
as sustained
cation
between
o content
instructional
experiment
toin such a two-way
process
woy
process
of generating
modeling
of thinking
aloud,
stimulate
instruction
numbers
self-questioning
emphasizing
of reflective
tiveness
of compositions
on individual
ideas.
in writing,
problem
involving
is ottributed
space
and
sixth-graders
to two-way
a rhetorical
aimed
problem
at helping
communispace.
them
An
sus-
independently,
in place
of the more typical
onecontent
and writing
it out.
Instruction
included
both by instructors
and students,
use of cues to
during
dialectical
statements
indicate
planning
monologues,
synthesis
of conflicting
in thinking-aloud
protocols
gains
were
made
at the
and
direct
strategy
ideas.
lncreosed
and rated
reflec-
level
of reflection
Most modern approaches to composition instruction give an important
place to reflective processes, in contrast to the linear procedures often espoused in older composition textbooks (Rose, 1981). Not only is reflection
valued as an aid to writing, but writing is valued as an aid to reflection
(Murray, 1978; Nystrand & Wiederspiel, 1977; Wason, 1980). Reflection is
here viewed, following Piaget (1980), as a dialectical process by which
higher-order knowledge is created through the effort to reconcile lowerorder elements of knowledge. Reflective processes figure in the instructional
approaches based on “heuristics of discovery” (Young, Becker, & Pike,
Research reported in this article was supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors
wish especially
to thank
the teachers
and principal
of Huron Public School, Toronto. Valuable
comments on a draft of this manuscript were provided by James Greeno.
Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Marlene Scardamalia. Department of Psychology, York University. 4700 Keele Street, Downsview, Ontario M3J lP3.
173
174
SCARDAMALIA.
BEREITER,
AND
STEINBACH
1970) and those based on dialogue between teacher and student concerning
the content or form of what the student has written (Graves, 1983; Staton,
1980). In the latter approaches there seems to be an underlying assumption
that the dialectical process carried on between teacher and student will eventually be internalized by the student, who will then be able to carry it on independently. This assumption remains largely untested, however.
The present study addresses the question of whether elementary school
children can be enabled to sustain reflective processes in composition independently. Planning episodes of experts thinking aloud while writing (Flower
& Hayes, 1980, 1981) are replete with evidence of reflective activity-elaborating and reformulating
goals and plans for achieving goals, critically
examining past decisions, anticipating difficulties, reconciling competing
ideas, etc. Such activity is almost completely absent from the protocols of
school-age writers (Burtis, Bereiter, Scardamalia, & Tetroe, 1983).
There is a variety of collateral evidence to suggest that this lack of
reflective statements in the protocols of young writers is not an artifact, that
immature writers do indeed follow a procedure that permits them to generate texts through primarily linear, nonreflective processes. This procedure is
one we call the “knowledge-telling
strategy” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1983).
In brief, it consists of reducing writing assignments to topics, then telling
what one knows about the topic. The knowledge-telling
strategy takes account of semantic and structural constraints, but it does not involve operating upon representations of goals for the text. It thus permits novices to
reduce writing to a routine. Primary concerns in this routine are what to say
next and how to put it into appropriate language-fairly
local considerations
that allow writers to deal with problems singly or in small units rather than
needing to work out implications of multiple constraints simultaneously.
Some of the evidence, apart from protocol data, that points to this
strategy is the following (for a fuller presentation, see Scardamalia & Bereiter,
in press, b):
a. Novice writers tend to present information in the order in which it
is thought of (Flower, 1979).
b. When given an ending sentence involving multiple constraints, they
tend to deal with these constraints as if they constituted topics that
must be dealt with one at a time (Tetroe, Bereiter, & Scardamalia,
1981).
c. Their texts tend to lack coherence except at the sentence-to-sentence
level, which suggests a forward-acting or additive approach to text
generation (McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982).
d. Students’ texts are typically devoid of substantive revision, suggesting a failure to rethink first-made decisions (Nold, 1982; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1983).
TEACHABILITY
OF REFLECTIVE
PROCESSES
175
Although, as noted, there has been considerable effort to foster reflective processes in school children through various types of dialogue, the
question of the extent to which children can learn to carry on such processes
independently does not seem to have been investigated. The question is important, not only from the standpoint of instructional psychology but from
the standpoint of understanding the emergence of more complex structures
in cognitive development (cf. Piaget, 1980). We had previously conducted
short-term experiments of limited focus (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982;
Scardamalia & Bereiter, in press, a). The present study is an extension of
that work into a substantial instructional intervention.
A DUAL
PROBLEM
SPACE
MODEL
OF REFLECTION
A principled approach to teaching reflective processes in writing requires
some assumption as to how such processes are carried out in the mind of the
solitary writer. One attractive notion has been that reflection takes the form
of an internal dialogue, as between writer and imagined reader (Widdowson, 1983). At least one instructional approach is based on teaching students
to carry on such dialogue explicitly (Gray, 1977). The informal approaches
referred to in the preceding section, which make use of teacher-student or
student-student dialogue, appear tacitly to assume such an internal-dialogue
model of reflection. However, in the body of protocol research on skilled
writers running from Emig (1971) to Flower and Hayes (1981) we are not
aware of a shred of evidence to support the internal-dialogue
model. We
take the absence of evidence to be severely damaging, since if internal dialogue were the main vehicle for reflective thought in writing, one would expect it to be so salient in the thinking-aloud
protocols of skilled writers that
it would have been noted even by those not specifically looking for it. (This
does not mean that instructional approaches based on the internal-dialogue
model are necessarily ineffective; but it does mean that their effects would
have to be explained on the basis of something more complex than mere
internalization
of a form of interchange between writer and reader).
The thinking-aloud
protocols of expert writers do not look anything
like dialogues, but they do look a great deal like problem-solving protocols
(Hayes & Flower, 1980). There is a great deal of soliloquy of the “where am
I?” variety, virtually no colloquy of the “where are you?” variety. Starting
from the notion of composing as a form of problem solving, and making
use of Newell’s generalization of the concept of problem spaces (1980), we
may construct a somewhat more plausible model of reflective processes in
writing. We may conceive of composition planning as taking place in two
types of problem spaces. One type, the cdnfent space, is made up of knowledge states that may be broadly characterized as beliefs. It is the kind of
176
SCARDAMALIA,
BEREITER,
AND
STEINBACH
space in which one works out opinions, makes moral decisions, generates
inferences about matters of fact, formulates causal explanations, and so on.
Content spaces thus have wide use in daily life and are by no means limited
to composition planning.
The other type of problem space, the rhetorical space, is specifically
tied to text production. The knowledge states to be found in this kind of
space are mental representations of actual or intended text-representations
that may be at various levels of abstraction from verbatim representation to
representations of main ideas and global intentions (Beaugrande, in press;
Scardamalia, Bereiter, & Goelman, 1982). Collins & Gentner (1980) provide
a succinct analysis of types of problems dealt with in a rhetorical space and
kinds of operators that may be applied. Whereas the goal states in the content space are knowledge (in the sense of warranted beliefs), the goal states
in the rhetorical space are plans for achieving various purposes in composition (Flower & Hayes, 1980).
Something like this notion of two types of problem space is implicit in
most cognitive descriptions of the composing process. Collins and Gentner
(1980) say, for instance:
It is important to separate idea production from text production. The
processes involved in producing text, whether they operate on the word
level, the sentence level, the paragraph level, or the text level, must produce a linear sequence that satisfies certain grammatical rules. In contrast, the result of the process of idea production is a set of ideas with
many internal connections, only a few of which may fit the linear model
desirable for text. (p. 53)
The obvious way to think of the connection between these two spaces
is to think of output from the content space serving as input to the rhetorical
space. The model illustrated in Figure 1, by contrast, shows operations
working in both directions. These may be thought of as productions, or
condition-action
pairs, some of which take beliefs as conditions and convert
them to rhetorical goals, some of which take rhetorical problems and convert them to subgoals to be satisfied in the content space-that is, through
operations on beliefs.
Our contention is that this interaction between the two problem spaces
constitutes the essence of reflection in writing. There may, of course, be
reflective thought that goes on wholly within the content space or within the
rhetorical space. (Considering different schemes for organizing a text might
be an occasion for the latter.) But the peculiar value that many have claimed
for writing as a way of developing one’s understanding (Murray, 1978) cannot inhere in either of these problem spaces separately. Thought carried out
solely within the content space is not distinctive to writing, and thought carried out solely within the rhetorical space would be expected to develop
Y
What
Figure
1. A dual
do I mean?
CONTENT
SPACE
problem
space
model
LINKING
of reflective
processes
OPERATIONS
in written
I
composition.
What do I say?
RHETORICAL
SPACE
178
SCARDAMALIA,
BEREITER,
AND
STEINBACH
craft but not wisdom or world knowledge. (In Plato’s Gorgias Sophocles
objects to rhetoric on this very count.)
The key requirement for reflective thought in writing, according to
this model, is the translation of problems encountered in the rhetorical
space back into subgoals to be achieved in the content space. For instance,
recognition that a key term will not be understood by many readers gets
translated into a call for a definition; search within the content space for
semantic specifications leads to a realization by the writer that he or she
doesn’t actually have a clear concept associated with the term, and this realization sets off a major reanalysis of the point being made. (See Scardamalia
& Bereiter, in press a, for additional examples.) Very similar interactions
occur in conversation-e.g.,
the query “What do you mean by X?“, coming
from a conversational partner, may set off the same reanalysis referred to
above. It is accordingly not surprising that in trying to represent a mechanism for reflective thought in writing, people have been attracted to the
internal dialogue model. What we propose instead is that the dialectical
process in conversation is sustained by the alternation between speakers and
their respective points of view and is sustained in writing by the alternation
between problem spaces with their different but related knowledge states.
The model presented in Figure 1 provides a simple way to account for
a variety of expert-novice differences in writing. The explanation is that the
novice possesses productions for transferring information from the content
space to the rhetorical space, but lacks productions for the return trip. The
result is a simple think-say process of composition, reflected in such previously noted tendencies as that of making the order of presentation correspond to the order of idea generation and limiting revision to cosmetic
improvements (that is, to improvements that can be worked out entirely
within the rhetorical space). The expert, on the other hand, carries on a twoway process of information transfer, which results in the joint evolution of
the composition and the writer’s understanding of what he or she is trying
to say-what Murray (1978) calls “outer” and “inner” revision.
This dual-space model led the authors to take a different approach to
teaching reflective processes in writing from those currently popular. Approaches that make use of “discovery” heuristics concentrate on operations
within the content space, resulting in a richer body of content to carry over
into the rhetorical space. Dialogue approaches rely on the teacher to provide
the linking operations between the two composing spaces, with the tacit assumption that these operations will eventually be taken over by the student.
The approach taken by the present authors could be described as us&red
monologue rather than dialogue. The focus is on the covert or overt monologues students carry on while planning a composition, and the instructional
interventions consist of efforts to introduce and support in such monologues
the two-way flow of information shown in Figure 1.
TEACHABILITY
OF REFLECTIVE
PROCESSES
179
METHOD
Experimental and control groups were two intact classes constituting the
sixth grade in a public school serving a middle to high income urban area.
Assignment to classes was reportedly random, as further suggested by pretest results. There were 30 students in the experimental class, 32 in the control class.
Instruction for the experimental class consisted of two 45minute periods a week for 15-weeks, conducted by two of the authors. The first 10 weeks
focused on the opinion essay and the remaining weeks on factual exposition.
Several distinctive components were woven together in the instruction:
1. Procedural facilitation.
Scardamalia & Bereiter (in press, a) had
found that use of cues that stimulated self-questioning during composition planning resulted in essays scored as showing more evidence of thought. In the present experiment students were taught
to incorporate phrases such as “An important point I haven’t considered is. . . ” and “Someone might think I’m exaggerating because
. . . ” into thinking-aloud
planning episodes. Initially,
thinking
aloud was conducted by instructors, then by student volunteers.
The person thinking aloud would stand before the class and start
thinking about plans for an essay on some assigned topic. At points
of stuckness the planner would select a card from a deck of planning cues, insert the selected phrase into the monologue, and continue as if that phrase had come to mind spontaneously.
Once this basic format was established the method was refined by encouraging students to make selections based on rational
choice of the kind of thinking they needed to be carrying out. To
aid them, cues were grouped into categories according to function
(see Tables I and II) and students were taught to consider first what
kind of cue they needed, and then to select a cue from within that
category. Both the selection of such planning cues and responses to
them were under the student’s control. No adult assistance was
provided.
Public demonstrations of planning were followed by students’
individually planning compositions at their seats, using individual
sets of cue cards, but carrying on the planning monologue subvocally.
2. Modeling thought. Earlier one-shot applications of modeling planning did not produce encouraging results with elementary students
(Burtis et al., 1983). In the present study, however, modeling was
used frequently, both with the instructor as model and with students modeling for each other, with and without cue cards, and
Planning
New
An
An
No
argument
aspect
new way
is..
one
will
Elaborate
An
considered
would
be..
would
be.
to think
of this
have
thought
not
being
very
this
I could
Another
A good
of..
this
clear
about
isn’t
what
Goals
A goal
I think
My purpose.
The history
Something
because.
agree
that.
I can tie
My moin
Cues
for
this together
point
is.
A cause
of (this is).
A practical
benefit
is.
A way to improve
the
is..
by..
Factual
Exposition
from
by.
wonder..
would
My
own
experience
with
of this
used
is.
A goal
to.
My
are.
this
is.
I think
I could
by
it is because.
a clear
picture
by...
This isn’t true of all.
To put it more
simply.
Readers
will find
it boring
to be
told..
If I want
to start
off
idea
I’ll.
I can tie this together
My
write
to..
purpose.
Puffing
180
be.
My awn feelings
about
this
An example
of (this
is).
This results
in.
Goals
use
a method
how
reader
strongest
II
I’m impressed
I sometimes
An explanation
I could
describe
this in more
detail
adding.
I could
add interest
by explaining.
This isn’t exactly
I could
give the
my
Eloborafe
is.
is).
of this is.
that is similar
to..
off with
Idea
distinction
of (this
explain
Used
write
If Together
If I want
to start
idea
I’ll.
Its features
remind
me of.
One thing
that makes
this different
other
things
like it is..
I might
I could
Putting
TABLE
An important
A consequence
is.
necessary
Planning
so.
this idea by adding..
to put it would
be..
on the other
side of the
I
up I’ll.
New
develop
way
point
argument
I’m getting
off topic
so.
This isn’t very convincing
But many
readers
won’t
To liven
of this.
The reason
I think
so..
Another
reason
that’s
good.
topic
just said so..
I could
make
my main
point
clearer.
A criticism
I should
deal with
in my
paper
is.
I really
think
because...
example
This is true,
but it’s not sufficient
My own feelings
about
this are..
I’ll change
this a little
by.
Improve
I’m
Essays
idea
even
better
idea
is.
important
point
I haven’t
yet is..
A better
A different
A whole
TABLE
I
Used
for Opinion
Cues
main
point
is..
It Tog&her
with
by..
my
strongest
TEACHABILITY
OF REFLECTIVE
PROCESSES
181
with follow-up discussions of the thinking strategies exhibited.
Such extensive use of modeling thought, coupled with direct instruction, had been found effective by Bird (1980) in promoting the
use of expert-like reading comprehension strategies by elementary
school students.
3. Direct strategy instruction. The idea of dialectic was explained to
students (in suitably simplified terms) and students were explicitly
urged to pursue a strategy of looking for high-level ways to reconcile inconsistencies. Dialectic was explained as a matter of trying to
“rise above” opposing arguments by producing an idea that preserves what is valid on both sides. In examining the complexity of
arguments in children’s opinion essays, Scardamalia (1981) found
that when elementary students tried to cope with opposing arguments they tended: (a) to juxtapose them, with no effort at resolution; (b) to choose one and reject the other; or, (c) to find some
compromise position which took account of the opposing sides but
did not take account of the reasons supporting those sides. In only
one out of 80 grade eight compositions did Scardamalia find evidence of successfully reconciling thesis, opposing argument, and
supporting argument. This is what students were urged to do in the
present study. It was explained that the strategy of rising to a plane
above the conflict applies not only to conflicting content but to
conflicts of any sort that may occur during composition-for
instance, the conflict between the wish to include a certain point and
the wish to hold to a neat structural plan.
Formal assessment was based on the following: Each student produced
pretest and post-test opinion essays and topical expositions, with assigned
topics counterbalanced as to order. Six randomly selected students from
each class were tape recorded as they thought aloud while planning each of
these four essays. During the term, experimental and control students also
produced a major topical essay, on a self-chosen topic, written during class
time, with up to four periods allowed for preparation and writing. Four
periods was the length of time experimental children worked spontaneously.
The control teacher agreed to set aside an equal amount of time and to encourage children to use the time to plan and to take notes. For this essay
students were allowed to consult library materials, and experimental students were allowed to use planning cue cards if they wished. For the pre- and
post-test essays no external aids were permitted.
RESULTS
Planning
Thinking-aloud
planning protocols were blind coded, using categories based
182
SCARDAMALIA.
EEREITER.
AND
STEINBACH
on Hayes and Flower’s division of the planning process into generating (primarily generating content), organizing, and goal setting (Hayes & Flower,
1980). In addition, coders marked any statement they judged to indicate
reflective thinking. As in other studies of composition planning in young
writers (Burtis et al., 1983). the great majority of statements consisted of
content generation. The frequency of other types of statements varied so
greatly both within and between subjects that no attempt was made to extract measures of central tendency.
Consistent effects did appear, however, in the number of protocol
Experimental
subjects went from a
statements coded as “reflective.”
pretest mean of 3.67 to a post-test mean of 5.17; control subjects went from
4.33 to 2.42. The difference between groups on the post-test is significant
both by analysis of variance, F(1,lO) =6.66, p< .05 and by analysis of
covariance, adjusting for pretest scores, F(1,9) = 11.33, pC .Ol.
Major Essay
Two raters rated these essays on a global scale ranging from knowledge-telling (“reads like an encyclopedia article”) on one extreme to reflective (“like
what you would expect to find in a magazine or collection of essays”) on the
other. Note that this was not a good-bad dimension. Good writing might be
found at either extreme, but of different sorts. A magazine article on bears,
for instance, would be expected to differ from an encyclopedia article on
bears in having more of a personal point of view, content and presentation
more geared to hold reader interest, a salient theme or point as opposed to a
multiplicity
of facts, and more indications of speculation and questioning.
On a 9-point scale, with a score of 9 being the most reflective, the experimental group averaged 5.43, compared to a control group mean of 3.35.
The difference is statistically significant beyond the .05 level (t(38) = 2.57).
Only students who had been present for the full four days of work on this
essay were included in the analysis.
Changes Between Pretest and Post-test
Pretest and post-test essays were subjected to a more detailed comparison
using criteria listed in Tables III and IV. Raters assigned difference scores of
0 to 3 points to paired essays, not knowing which was the pre- and which
was the post-test essay. This resulted in a 7-point scale, once direction of
difference was taken into account. Difference scores aggregated over all the
rating dimensions showed a significant advantage for the experimental group
on the topical essay (Z= 2.14, ranks-sums test, p< .05). Aggregated difference scores also favored the experimental group on the opinion essay, but
not to a degree approaching statistical significance.
TEACHABILITY
OF REFLECTIVE
PROCESSES
183
Mean difference scores on the separate rating dimensions are shown in
Tables III and IV. An examination of the scores in Table III suggests that
the strong points of topical articles written by the experimental group students dents lay in their having the character of personal essays that revealed
normal personal involvement in the topic (items 1,2, and 9) and an effort to
involve the readers as well (items 3,7, and 8). Pre- and post-test essays by an
experimental group student, shown in Table V, illustrate such a shift toward
essay-like character.
Table IV indicates that the same rating dimensions are among the
stronger points of the opinion essays as well, but that the control group
students also made gains on these dimensions. In light of the effort to teach
a dialectic, “rise above it” strategy, it is interesting to note that the largest
advantage of the experimental group over the control group on opinion
essays was on the criterion, “Attempts to resolve opposing points instead of
simply noting pros and cons.” On the other hand, where experimental students did worst in comparison to control students was on items 10 and 11,
which have to do with developing a coherent and well-thought-out position
on the opinion essay topic. This suggests a gap between attempt and execution, which will be expanded upon in the next section.
Mean
Differences
between
Pretest
TABLE
and
III
Post-test
Factual
Expository
Essays
Group
Rotlna
Dimension
1. Suggestion
not limited
2. Essay-like
3.
Experlmentol
of person01
involvement
or interest
in topic,
to the reloting
of personol
experiences.
chorocter.
OS opposed
to having
the character
of an encyclopedia
article.
Use of attention-getting
expressions
in opening
or closing
sentences.
4. Adherence
focussing
to requirements
on one animal
or points,
simply
B. Attempt
11.
Note:
rather
than
taking
of uncertainty,
of a theme
or
the
Positive
Maximum
score
indicates
difference=
-34
+.41
+.12
to
with
of the
essay,
topic.
of topic
-.23
interest
or aspect
of sub-topics.
higher
-.13
+.20
+.11
+ .43
-.ll
+.54
+ .67
- .36
+.26
- .37
+.14
-.21
not
to the
for
questioning,
or speculation.
purpose
or delimitation
of
post-test
f3.
+.52
0
reader’s
topic.
Focus
on a central
theme
or point
opposed
to unfocussed
collection
- .36
+.02
because
of its connection
to the
to communicate
interestingness
reader,
granted.
9. Indications
10. Stotement
+ .59
especially
of the assignment-i.e.,
or occupation
and dealing
its interestingness.
5. A distinctive
viewpont
on the topic.
6. A distinctive
manner
of presentation.
7. Content
selected
to convey
the point
Control
of topic,
than
pretest.
-.02
OS
la4
SCARDAMALIA,
BEREITER,
TABLE
Mean
Difference
between
Pretest
AND
STEINBACH
IV
and
Post-test
Opinion
Essays
Group
Rot/no
1. Balanced
integrated
2.
Experimental
Dimension
use of personal
experience
and
with more
obiective
information;
bioses
recognized
Essay-like
character,
as such.
as opposed
to having
feelings
personal
the
7.
8.
9.
conventional
or fomiliar
manner
wisdom,
typical
scenarios.
of presentation.
Definite
line of thought
(even
if rambling)
text,
as compared
to a list structure.
Avoidance
of polemic,
overstatement,
and
simplistic
arguments.
Note:
Positive
Maximum
score
indicates
difference=
points
post-test
+.34
+.23
0
11.
Attempts
to resolve
opposing
noting
pros and cons.
+ .07
+.04
An elaborated
statement
simple
“it depends,”
“it’s
should,”
” they
shouldn’t.”
13.
+.16
personal
10.
12.
+ .21
to
as opposed
bad,”
“they
instead
higher
runs
+.10
-.13
not
of uncertainty,
questioning,
or speculation,
an effort
to get at the truth
of the matter
problems
involved
in the issue.
of position
good,”
“it’s
+.36
relative
Content
selected
to convey
the point
of the essay,
simply
because
of its connection
to the topic.
Attempts
to persuade
or get reader
to think,
rather
thon relying
on unsupported
statements
of opinion.
Indications
suggesting
to resolve
+.19
to
merits
of the two designated
ways
of handling
allowances.
A distinctive
viewpoint
on the topic-in
contrast
reporting
reactions,
6. A distinctive
+ .36
character
of knowledge
telling
or egocentric
self expression.
3. Use of attention
getting
facts,
ideas
or expressions,
especially
in opening
or closing
sentences.
4. Adherence
to requirements
of the assignment-i.e.,
dealing
with
ktfluence
of TV as a whole
or with
5.
Control
+.20
+.04
f.28
+ .22
-t-.36
+ .37
+.12
+.27
- .02
+.19
-.02
-.lO
+ .44
+ .23
or
to
through
dogmatic,
of simply
than
pretest.
f3.
INFORMAL
OBSERVATIONS
The quantitative results point to some overall change in the direction of
reflectivity having taken place in the experimental group. The following
informal observations are intended to offer suggestions-of
a necessarily
more subjective and speculative nature- on what the underlying cognitive
changes may have been that were reflected in the quantitative gains.
1. Enjoyment of planning as an activity. Although the experimenters
had qualms about introducing the activity of having students plan
TEACHABILITY
Sample
Pretest
and
Past-test
OF REFLECTIVE
PROCESSES
185
TABLE V
Essays by an Experimental
Factual
Group
Student
(Pd3St)
Job
An
ardesses
people.
be an
interesting
hove
I know
airline
fob
or occupation
is being
on interesting
fob because
they
because
my friend
is an airline
stewardess
when
I grow
An
All
or Occupofion
animals
ore
animal
better
than
you.
onimol
is a tiger because
it is only fierce
and only
but
That proves
of its fierce
hurts
people
(Post-fest)
Kind
That
is whv
I think
the
tiger
all over the
and travels
I think
world
a lot.
airline
stew-
ond meet new
I would
like to
sometimes
of Animof
you
may
find
a person
that
may
like
an
that all people
are different.
I think
on interesting
and gentle
sides makes
it exquisite.
Most people
think
but that isn’t so. The tiger
has so much
grace
in his
walk
it almost
looks
as if he puts a lot of thought
it’s one of a kind,
and nothing
could
be better
me.
stewardess.
up.
fnteresting
interesting,
on airline
get to travel
stewardess
is the
most
into it, and his fur coat is so unique
or more
beoutiful
thon that striped
interestina
I think
coot to
onimal.
aloud in front of their classmates, this proved to be an extremely
popular activity with most of the students, who clamored for a
chance at what they came to call “soloing.”
No doubt a good part
of the enjoyment was simply the pleasure of being in center stage,
but it is nevertheless noteworthy that these students seemed to find
planning a significant enough skill that they were eager to display
their ability at it under conditions where even the most talented
were more likely to display effort and difficulty than flair.
2. Increased ability to monitor and analyze thinking. This was revealed
mainly in the sessions where students took turns planning aloud in
front of the class. Students appeared to become increasingly careful
in monitoring the thinking of the “soloist.”
They began to notice
discrepancies between goals and plans-for instance, a discrepancy
between an author’s stated intention of getting readers to appreciate
the difficulties of modern dance and a plan that consisted mainly
of description of types of modern dance.
3. Recognition of problems at the planning level. The monitoring and
analysis described above often resulted in problems being posed
which the author did not know how to solve, with an ensuing discussion of possible solutions and inquiries as to how expert writers
would handle such a problem.
4. Understanding the function of planning cues. The division of planning cue cards into functional types, as shown in Tables I and II,
was done in collaboration with the students. This activity, which
had been intended to occupy one class session, ended up taking
three class sessions to complete because of the amount of discus-
186
SCARDAMALIA,
BEREITER,
AND
STEINBACH
sion about what functions various cues could serve in planning.
For instance, students would argue that the cue, “My main point is
. . ., ” could serve either for figuring out one’s goal or for putting
the text together. By their own reports, however, students had never
previously thought of ideas in terms of their functions in texts.
Further indications of understanding cue functions came from the
planning-aloud
sessions, where students gave clear indications of
considering what type of cue they needed to guide their thinking at
different points during planning.
5. Using goals as criteria for selecting ideas. From the beginning of
the course, the experimenters encouraged students to state goals
for their compositions as an aid to planning. The students showed
little indication of making use of such goal statements, however,
until they reached the point where they were generating more content ideas than they could use. Previous studies had shown that
generating sufficient content to complete an expository writing
assignment is a common problem with elementary school students
(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982). By using the planning cues, however, students were soon able to generate more ideas than they
could appropriately
incorporate into the intended composition.
Once the problem of excess ideas arose, students began to be able
to use goals as a basis for selection. Thus, for instance, if they established the goal of making their composition amusing, they could
assess ideas on their potential for being amusing. Such assessment
in turn led to thinking of rhetorical strategies for achieving goalsfor instance, making a fact about penguins at the zoo dying from
swallowing coins tossed at them amusing by comparing the penguin
to a piggy-bank.
6. More mature notemaking. Previous research (Burtis et al., 1983)
had shown a developmental
progression in notemaking during
composition, from listing content more-or-less in the form that it
would appear in the finished composition to sketching ideas at different levels, resulting in a plan that differed both in content and
arrangement from the eventual composition. During the course of
the experiment, students began to display many of the more adultlike characteristics in their notemaking-for
instance, listing ideas
for and against in separate columns, or separating statements of
personal feelings from factual statements. They also started to use
arrows and other graphic devices to indicate how ideas needed to
be reorganized from the order in which they were first thought of.
One lesson of about 20 minutes was given on notemaking; however, most of the devices used by the students were of their own invention.
TEACHABILITY
OF REFLECTIVE
PROCESSES
187
7. More reflective use of information sources. The behavior of experimental group students during four days of planning their major
essays showed signs of the back-and-forth movement between content and rhetorical spaces depicted in Figure 1. They tended to generate some initial plan for a paper, then go to library resources for
particular information
that they found they needed, recast their
plan in light of new information gained, and so on. By contrastto judge from planning notes, reports by their teacher, and the
compositions themselves-control
group students proceeded in the
one-way manner more typical of novices. They first extracted material from encyclopedias and similar source books, and then developed a composition from it, allowing the information sources to
dictate both the types of content and the general form of their
essays.
8. Ability to sustain planning. In preparing their major essays, experimental group students spontaneously took four days to plan
and write them (some using all the time for planning and doing the
writing at home). By contrast, it took a great deal of encouragement and support from their teacher to get the control group students to spend four days on the project, and the most common use
these students made of their time was for extracting additional information from books to insert into their essays. In this connection, it may be noted that the pre- and post-test essays were written
under time constraints (30 minutes), which allowed only minimal
time for planning. While this time allotment may have been ample
for the kind of planning students normally do (Applebee, 1981;
Burtis, et al., 1983), it obviously did not allow the extended plan
development that experimental group students had been learning
to do, but which they were not yet very facile at. This might help to
explain why experimental-control
differences were more pronounced on the major essay than on the pre-post comparisons.
9. Beginnings of a dialectical process. In full-fledged reflective planning, dialectical processes may be thought of as going on at two
levels. At a lower level, individual ideas are being reconsidered
and modified as a result of the interaction between rhetorical and
content-related concerns. At a higher level, goals and general point
of view are being transformed through this interaction (Scardamalia
& Bereiter, 1982). It is at this higher level that what we have called
the “rise above it” strategy applies. There are clear indications
that gains in .reflective planning at the lower of these levels took
place. The increased incidence of protocol statements scored as
showing reflective thought is the most definite evidence. Informal
observations of students “soloing”
bear out the conviction that
188
SCARDAMALIA,
BEREITER,
AND
STEINBACH
with the help of planning cues they engaged in a substantial amount
of reconsideration of individual ideas.
What was not evident, except in scattered instances, was reflection at
the higher level, involving major goals or viewpoint on a topic. Although,
as noted in point 4, students did begin to make use of goal statements, analyses of the post-test planning protocols indicated that the modal number of
goal statements per protocol was one. When such solitary goals are compared to the complex goal networks found by Flower and Hayes (1980, 198 1)
in the protocols of expert writers, it is not surprising that little dialectical activity involving goals was observed to take place. Another indication of the
lack of high-level reformulation
of plans is that when doubts, questions, or
alternative ways of looking at a topic occurred in planning, they tended to
be expressed directly in the text rather than to modify the overall plan of the
text. This may explain why the data in Table IV show the experimental
group students to have gained in efforts to reconcile opposing viewpoints
but not in ability to present a coherent and balanced argument.
There was, however, some indication of movement toward higher-level
reflection. These indications came mainly from the kinds of help students
sought while they were working on compositions. Increasingly their problems
had to do, not with a particular sentence or idea, but with the reconciliation
or synthesis of different ideas-different
intentions, different statements,
different plans of attack, etc. Thus the basis for dialectic appeared to be
taking shape-“the
splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts” (Lenin, 1915/1977, p. 381)-but
the ability to carry it
through apparently remained to be developed.
CONCLUSION
The question that motivated this study was whether elementary school children could be enabled to sustain reflective processes in writing independently.
The answer, as furnished by this initial study, is affirmative but with qualifications. There are indications from the extent of planning and from the
presence of reflective statements in thinking aloud protocols that some twoway traffic between content space and rhetorical space had been established.
This conclusion was further supported by ratings on reflectiveness of the
essays produced. Reflection appeared to be mainly at a local level, however,
focused on individual ideas. Reflection having to do with the reshaping and
elaboration of goals and central ideas, so noteworthy in expert writers (Flower
& Hayes, 1980, 1981). had yet to gain a secure foothold in their composing
processes. It should be noted, however, that what the children were able to
do by the end of the experiment they were able to do independently. Most of
the informal educational research related to children’s composing permits
TEACHABILITY
OF REFLECTIVE
PROCESSES
189
no such judgment. The authors intend following up the experimental and
control group students for one or more years to observe whether there is
persistence and further development of the cognitive changes that appeared
to have been set in motion by this intervention.
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