Writing and conceptual change.: What changes?

This study was focused on elementary school students' processes of scientific understanding within a classroom environment characterized as a community of discourse. In particular, it explored the role of written discourse both on the plane of knowledge development and the conceptualization and evaluation of the writing activity itself. The purposes of the study were: (a) to see whether students could use writing as a means to express and compare ideas, reason and reflect on them in the process of scientific understanding; (b) to see whether writing in the service of learning facilitated the understanding of the new topic through conceptual change; (c) to see whether writing affected the conceptualization of the writing activity itself. Thirty-six fourth graders divided in two groups, experimental (writing) and control (no-writing), were involved in the implementation of curriculum units on plants, whose target concept was photosynthesis. The findings show that in the experimental group the students reached a better conceptual understanding of the target concept and more advanced metaconceptual awareness of the changes in their own knowledge structures. Moreover, the conceptualization of the writing activity seemed to change as well to some extent as writing in a conceptual change process affected the ways learners viewed some functions of it.