At our most recent webinar on transforming struggling students into proficient thinkers and writers with Webspiration Classroom™ service, one of our attendees asked a fabulous question: How does visual learning improve students’ writing skills? While we often say that our visual learning tools, like Kidspiration®, Inspiration® and Webspiration Classroom, improve writing and support the writing process, I wanted to discuss it in further detail for today’s blog post.
Research Proves That Visual Learning is Important to Writing
Many of us will agree that writing is ingrained in almost every aspect of our lives – making it a vital piece of students’ education. Yet, when we look at proficiency standards, we find that only one in five students, in grades four, eight and 12, in the United States are proficient writers.1 This is a startling statistic that proven visual learning strategies can dramatically improve.
A report by the Research and Evaluation Department at Kamehameha Schools states:
- “Specifically, research shows a direct correlation between instruction based on writing process techniques and students’ writing proficiency level.”
- “Pre-writing is essential to producing quality writing. Research indicates that skilled writers spend significantly more time organizing and planning what they are going to write.”2
Visual Learning is a Vital Part of the Writing Process
So, when teachers ask students to create a bubble diagram, a web or any other visual diagram in the pre-writing process, it’s utilizing visual learning to help students clarify their thinking and organize their writing. Even outlining, another pre-writing technique found in all of Inspiration Software’s visual learning tools, utilizes visual learning. Outlines with topics and subtopics create a visual structure for students that also helps them organize their content and writing.
Diagrams and outlines are inseparable tools to facilitate and improve the way students formulate and organize their ideas for writing. In pre-writing we are focused on honing a topic, identifying supporting content and organizing our thoughts into a logical flow that will articulate our knowledge, thoughts and ideas. One of the best ways to teach students to pre-write effectively is to teach the use of visual learning as an effective and important strategy for writing.
Suzanne Tavolacci, our Northeast Regional Account Manager, and a former middle school English and Language Arts teacher, summed this up beautifully:
“Visual learning and writing go hand-in-hand. By teaching students to map out their ideas in this fashion, you encourage them to develop a plan. So many students would love to skip the pre-writing portion of the process because while it is so important, it can be so painful! That’s because they’re having difficulty connecting their ideas within their mind’s eye. Seeing the connections form between their ideas and also knowing how easy it’s going to be to move those ideas around, is going to translate into more thoughtful, analytical and organized writing.”
Unlike many free applications, Kidspiration, Inspiration and Webspiration Classroom all provide a platform for your students to diagram their ideas, as well as providing an integrated outlining environment to brainstorm and organize their ideas. This helps your students develop the foundation for their essay, story or report, giving them a plan for their writing and more time to write and refine their work.
I encourage you to take another look at Kidspiration 3 and Inspiration 9, as well as our new Webspiration Classroom, by signing up for one of our free webinars this March at www.inspiration.com/wcwebinar. See for yourself how these tools might help your students learn to write more effectively.
Thanks for stopping by! See you next week!
Mona Westhaver
President and Co-founder, Inspiration Software
- “Online Resources for Teachers – Teacher Education – SMU.” Southern Methodist University – SMU. Web. 18 Feb. 2011. <http://smu.edu/education/teachereducation/resources/writing.asp>. [↩]
- “THE WRITING PROCESS: An Overview of Research on Teaching Writing as a Process.” Web. 18 Feb. 2011. <http://www.ksbe.edu/spi/PDFS/Reports/WritingProcessreport.pdf>. [↩]
