Research indicates that writing enhances learning in several ways:

• Writing requires knowledge and focuses thought. In order to write, students must have something to say. Therefore, students must acquire and present content (facts, generalizations, and concepts) when they write a social studies assignment or test response. However, students do not merely express knowledge by writing, they also discover knowledge. Writing is inherently an integrative process, combining the total intellectual capacities of the writer.

• Writing enhances critical thinking. Social studies educators recognize that higher-order thinking skills should be at the heart of our curriculum design and instructional strategies. A recently developed curriculum proficiency guide states, "The primary goal of social studies education...should be to help students develop the ability to make well-informed, well-reasoned decisions, and to act responsibly.

• Writing shifts the responsibility for learning away from the teacher and toward the student. Ability to write empowers students with a sense of efficacy and achievement. A written essay belongs only to the writer, not another student or the teacher. More importantly, writing encourages personal learning. Properly designed assignments require students to not only collect knowledge, but to determine which knowledge to retain, which to discard, and how to present it. Such choices may reveal as much about what students do not know (about the subject) as they do about what the students do know. However, this can serve as an excellent diagnostic tool for the teacher. Writing leads to more questions and to the discovery of connections between events, people, and ideas.