It is probably much easier to contract a disease than to absorb a vocabulary word.  Although learning may be compared to being exposed to a virus, such exposure is temporary for the mind as a virus is short-lived in the body. Emerging research on memory and effort to learn confirms that the “exposure” version of learning is less effective than the recursion of learning.

Cognitive researchers report that studying large chunks of information repetitively may be more effective than committing smaller chunks to memory. In “The Ease of Processing Heuristic and the Stability Bias: Dissociating Memory, Memory Beliefs, and Memory Judgments” Nate Kornell and colleagues Alan D. Kastel, Matthew G. Rhodes, and Sarah K. Tauber observed that the number of times a vocabulary word was reviewed had a stronger effect on memory than the larger font size of the vocabulary word.

In the Psychological Science study, Mr. Kornell and researchers from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Kent State, and the University of California, Los Angeles, asked online participants to predict how easily they would remember vocabulary words after studying them once or multiple times. Some of the words were presented in the standard font size on the person’s computer screen, while others were presented four times larger—something that makes the text feel easier to process but prior research shows does not improve memory. In addition, for some words, participants were told they would be allowed to study more than once. (Education Week, April 22, 2011).

The key finding was that students predicted that they would learn better from the larger font size than the repetitive learning from the smaller font size. Students associate ease of learning with memory retention. The testing of the words showed the inverse was true.  Students learned the words better with each time the memorizing task was repeated, rather than the increased font size.

Although the tasks of memorizing and writing are dissimilar, the recursive nature of writing may explain why students assimilate information better by writing about it. In the recent study “Writing to Read,” research synthesizers Steven Graham and Michael Hebert  reported that numerous studies prove the effectiveness of writing about a text for reading comprehension (Graham and Herbert 201o).  Among the recommendations from their meta-analysis:

HAVE STUDENTS WRITE ABOUT THE TEXTS THEY READ. Students’ comprehension of science,
social studies, and language arts texts is improved when they write about what they read,
specifically when they
• Respond to a Text in Writing (Writing Personal Reactions, Analyzing and Interpreting the Text)
• Write Summaries of a Text
• Write Notes About a Text
• Answer Questions About a Text in Writing, or Create and Answer Written Questions About a Text (“Writing to Read p. 11)

The act of writing demands a better assimilation of a text than merely reading it.  Even the basic challenge of summarizing a reading, demands a re-shaping of the information in a shorter format. In that re-shaping, something is added to the inert language on the page. The reader is assimilating the information by writing about it. Anyone who has paused to write a reflection or written response to a reading knows this feeling. It is more like digestion than infection. It becomes part of you.

But writing is not copying. Copying has been discredited as learning and certainly receives no welcome on an assigned paper. We call that “plagiarism.”  Writing is much harder, and the current research says that harder is better for learning. Learning is gradual, recursive, and challenging.

In the standards-driven school it is helpful to remember these principles of learning. Students will not reach the standards of complex learning by consecutive weekly injections, beginning with Standard #1 and injecting a different Standard every week until the day of reckoning.  Both writing and learning are gradual, recursive and challenging.  Both the body and mind follow this principle and both grow through assimilation.

Finally, this argues for writing across the disciplines. Writing as re-shaping is probably our most ready instrument of slowing down learning. Thoughtful writing. Writing that exasperates both student and teacher, because it is harder to compose and harder to read.  The resistance in both student and teacher is the signal that learning is happening. The student is constructing meaning and the teacher is construing it.

As one writes and the other reads, assimilation happens.