An aptitude–treatment interaction approach to writing-to-learn

In this article, we propose to link the study of writing-to-learn to the theory of aptitude–treatment interaction (ATI). In an experimental study we examined the effects of a course on “Writing-to-learn about literary stories” consisting of writing tasks adapted to either a planning or a revising writing strategy. We hypothesized that the effects of writing-to-learn tasks depend on the interaction between students' preferred writing strategy and the type of writing instruction, matching or mismatching students' writing strategy. Our match hypothesis was in the main confirmed: results indicated that adapting writing tasks to students' writing strategies increases their learning in the field of literature.