Writing to Like Writing: A Longitudinal First-Person Education Experiment

Reported in this article was an experiment in which 143 undergraduates in an educational psychology course were encouraged to engage in the performance learning activity (PLA) of "seeking their own revelations (or insights) and reflecting on them in writing." The hypothesis, grounded in the biofunctionally-based, first-person inclusion/exclusion theory, was that engagement in this PLA is a multi-front integration of the writer's intellectual, affective, emotional, and behavioral resources. The Writing Apprehension Scale (WAS) was used to measure the strengths of the initial (before intervention) and eventual (after intervention) apprehension dispositions of the participants. Findings from this study were that the first-person inclusive intervention engaged two performance dispositions to cause a reduction, by first-person mutual exclusion of the second/third-person disposition, in the strength of writing apprehension. This study is the first one in which seeking revelations and reflecting on them in writing lessened the strength of the writing apprehension disposition.