Measuring discovery through writing

Despite the general agreement that writing leads to the development of understanding, there is scant research assessing how writing affects writers’ subjective state of understanding. In this chapter, we describe our attempt to develop a multi-item scale capable of distinguishing between subjective understanding and organization and we assess its psychometric properties. Our initial results confirm that these two components of knowledge can be reliably measured and provide support for their validity. In addition, we show that the distinction between subjective understanding and organization offers a useful way of distinguishing between the effects of different writing processes on the writer’s knowledge.