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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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