Addressing the Writing Gap: Preparing High School Students for College Success

At its best, writing has helped transform the world. Revolutions have been started by it. Oppression has been toppled by it. And it has enlightened the human condition. American life has been richer because people like Rachel Carson, Cesar Chavez, Thomas Jefferson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. have given voice to the aspirations of the nation and its people. And it has become fuller because writers like James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Edith Wharton have explored the range of human misery and joy. When pressed, many of us, young and old alike, still turn to pen and ink in the effort to make sense of our grief, pleasure, rage, or happiness - The National Commission on Writing: The Neglected “R”

Benjamin Schafer, a PhD candidate at Yale, teaches history and writing to undergrads and regularly provides feedback to high school students on their writing. He has observed how students at both the high school and college levels struggle with writing. “I really think one of the long-term consequences of the pandemic will be that a whole group of kids who were middle and high schoolers during that period will have lost some of the foundational elements of writing…Sometimes, with both my undergrads and high school students, I have to talk about things like a subject and a predicate and why those things matter for sentence structure.” Beyond that, Ben finds that his students struggle with organizing their writing. “What we don't get to with writing, especially until the college level, is that writing is not just a shopping receipt of all of your research. It's not just the recipe; it's the actual dish. A writer needs to take all of the ingredients and make sense of them for the reader.”

What Benjamin sees is not an isolated phenomenon. Anecdotally, educators across K-12 and even college report that their students are struggling with writing. What's most concerning, however, is we're not even tracking how much students are struggling. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing proficiency test was released in 2011, 9 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which educators across the board believe exacerbated an already critical problem. In that 2011 test, just 27% of high schoolers scored "proficient or above.”

The NAEP consistently measures math and reading every two years, yet writing appears to be neglected. Without testing and measurement of proficiency, we don’t know where high schoolers are in terms of their writing abilities and how that might impact their ability to write in college. 

And if writing proficiency has historically been so poor, why are we not consistently testing it? If we’re not testing it, what are schools and teachers able to do about the lack of proficiency? What can students do to help themselves?

How Did We Get Here?

According to Stephen Sawchuk, Assistant Managing Editor of Education Week, penmanship and spelling were historically the only writing-related things taught in the classroom. It was only until the late 20th century that students were taught about the process of writing as a complex and individualized task. Failing to meet writing standards is somewhat of a recurring theme in US education. In 1874 Harvard established an entrance exam to test prospective students’ writing proficiency, of which over half failed.

Why is writing something that high school students struggle with? To start, writing is a fundamentally difficult thing to do, which makes teaching writing also difficult. Many teachers across K-12 feel unprepared, and a 2016 study of nearly 500 teachers in grades three through eight across the country found that fewer than half had taken a college class that devoted significant time to the teaching of writing, and fewer than a third had taken a class solely devoted to how children learn to write. Another 2016 study found that most teachers don’t support the writing standards that they are supposed to teach, citing that there are too many topics to cover and also omissions of key aspects of writing. 

The debate over the right way to teach students writing has been contentious. Educators go back and forth on the right approach, whether that’s focusing more on grammar and sentence structure, or emphasizing freewriting, where students share their thoughts and narratives from their own lives (this Atlantic article describes in more detail the back-and-forth pendulum of traditionalist and progressive ideas in education over the years).

Writing education also suffered greatly in the 21st century due to increased focus on math and reading. As outlined by Justin Parmenter in EdNC, in 2002, President George W Bush signed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which aimed to raise math and reading achievement levels. Writing was not a focus of this legislation. NCLB set a very high bar for schools, using a metric called Adequate Yearly Progress to measure how schools were performing based on standardized test scores, attendance, and graduation rates. If schools failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress targets, they faced severe punishments, such as being forced to replace teachers or even turning over school operations to the state or private companies. With these punitive measures in place, writing education became less of a priority. “Once NCLB became law, the implications for classroom teachers across the country were clear: The primary focus for each child became their scores on standardized tests in reading and math…As the realities of NCLB trickled down to the classroom level, the overwhelming pressure on English teachers to get results on reading tests led to many teachers reducing the amount of instructional time devoted to writing.” 

The struggle to help students write better is the turbulent combination of two things: the inherent difficulty in teaching a subject like writing and the deprioritization of writing education as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act, which made math and literacy the overwhelming focus for schools. 

The NAEP has also been slow to perform a new national test on writing. Instead, they’ve directed their efforts toward creating a new framework for writing, which is estimated to be finished around 2030. Meanwhile, reading and math proficiency, education’s golden children, continue to be tested every two years. With the way that institutions choose to prioritize math and reading, you would think that those skills are far more important than writing. Research shows that this could not be further from the truth.

Why Should You Care About Your Students’ Writing

Writing helps students learn how to think. It’s an exercise for the brain that goes beyond mastering sentence structure and grammar. Steven Mintz, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, explains that  “Writing is not merely a mode of communication. It’s a process that, if we move beyond simple formulas, forces us to reflect, think, analyze, and reason. The goal of a writing assignment worth its salt is not simply to describe or persuade or summarize: it’s to drive students to make sense of difficult material and develop their own distinctive take.” Writing helps to enhance all the analytical skills that students need to excel in the real world and form their own opinions, which is why writing shouldn’t just be a focal point for students interested in fields like English or journalism. For instance, writing is a critical component of STEM research. Miwa Wenzel, a genetics researcher at Cornell and a Polygence writing fellow, describes the importance of good writing in academic research. “In research, your research is really only as good as you can tell it to other people and get other people to understand it. If other people can't understand it, then you're really limited in the impact you can have.”

Further, we know that young students are full of bright ideas, but writing helps them to connect those ideas. According to the National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, writing “allows the [students] to concretize abstract ideas and to ‘connect the dots in their knowledge.’” Writing itself is a form of higher-level learning, where students not only have to know the content they’re writing about but also understand how it connects to broader themes and adjacent ideas. As Benjamin Schafer mentions, “Writing is not a shopping receipt of all of your research. It's not just the recipe, it's the actual dish.”

Students can use these analytical skills that they’ve developed to help them succeed in their future careers. Strong writing skills help students get their foot in the door for professions, as an Association of American Colleges and Universities survey found that 93% of employers said, "A demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is important." 

Once students are in their jobs, scientific research has found that effective writing has a huge impact in the workplace and directly impacts the brains of the audience. For example, researchers studied how emotional word choice in writing can affect the way readers feel and think. According to Harvard Business Review, “experiments show that when people hear a list of words, they often miss a few as a result of “attentional blinks” caused by limits in our brain processing power. But we don’t miss the emotionally significant words. With those, there are no blinks.” Great writing has the psychological power to help messages stick and resonate with the audience. Students who understand and use these techniques can set themselves apart in their future internships and jobs. 

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Write Essays

Another puzzling reason why writing skills are ignored at the national level is that immediately after high school, college freshmen are thrown headfirst into the infamous first-year writing course or seminar. These courses follow the same structure at any university: students write three to four essays throughout the course, with each essay undergoing multiple drafts and peer revisions. Students are also exposed to basic research and citation skills.

For many college freshmen, the first-year writing course is an experience where they’re politely reminded that high school writing is over. Professors expect more depth, at least 6 pages double-spaced, and a full bibliography. Compare that to high school writing, where a Vanderbilt University study found that when students wrote, “they were most commonly making lists, writing brief summaries, or completing short answer assignments.” As Polygence alum Shravan Kannan describes from his own experience, “when writing essays and research papers in high school, I would just have to talk about a topic and write in detail supporting one side of that topic and call it a day. However, when coming to college, doing just that would only get you 50% of the full credit for an assignment.”

There’s a wide gap between what we expect students to write in high school and what we expect students to write in college. A gap makes sense on the surface because college writing should be better than high school writing. But a gap shouldn’t exist only to give students a sense of progression. And if the gap continues to widen, we should consider whether enough is being done at the high school level to address it.

This same phenomenon is happening with college-level reading. A recent viral Atlantic article, titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” investigated how many students come to college struggling to read whole books. Professors noticed that students couldn’t grapple with books the same way that they used to. High school curriculums are replacing whole texts with excerpts. There’s a clear gap between what college professors thought students should know by the time they arrived at college and what students were actually capable of. This is a deterioration of the bridge between the high school reading and college reading worlds. This same gap exists in the writing world as well.

What Solutions Are Out There For Students?

The question now is, how can you help your students meet this gap between college-level writing and high-school writing? We can’t expect the NAEP to provide much guidance as they continue to work on their national framework to be completed by 2030. If your students are current high schoolers, by the time 2030 rolls around they’ll at least be in their sophomore year of college. And with there being constant push and pull on the proper way to teach writing in schools, how can we ensure that the writing skills of our students don’t depend upon the whims of educational politics?

One of the few things that’s universally agreed upon is that receiving feedback is an effective way to improve writing skills. The issue is that high school teachers are often so overwhelmed with responsibilities that it’s difficult for them to provide detailed, consistent feedback to everyone. 

Artificial intelligence tools are one of the most promising solutions to provide more frequent, comprehensive writing feedback. As outlined by Reach Capital, “Some tools allow teachers to set a rubric that guides the grades and feedback delivered by AI. The idea is that AI can handle some basic feedback — on grammar, syntax, diction — so that teachers can focus on other important areas.” There are, however, limitations to the current state of AI writing feedback tools. According to research done by Reach Capital, AI writing graders can competently evaluate the mechanical elements of writing (grammar, tone, diction, syntax) and the structural components as set by the rubric. But when the feedback touches on specific subject matter, it can lack specificity, such as giving the feedback ‘explore more deeply’ without explaining how to. 

While AI does show promising signs of improving student writing, it is still marred by concerns and risks. Students can very easily abuse generative AI to help them write essays and complete assignments. This is especially concerning given that many high school writing assignments are not in essay format but rather shorter forms like summaries, which AI can easily tackle and produce high quality work. By encouraging the adoption of AI tools, we could unintentionally create a world where students don’t actually write at all and simply ask AI to produce answers for them. What would start out as putting out fires in writing education could expand into an untamable inferno? And if writing is about learning to think, a whole generation of students is in danger of not knowing how to think and analyze. As writer and entrepreneur Paul Graham argues, many skills become obsolete over time, but writing should not be one of those things. As technology continues to progress and companies build better tools, we have a responsibility to question the guardrails around these tools so that we avoid this disaster scenario.

If AI tools are currently a double-edged sword that’s sharp on both sides, what can students do about their writing on their own right now, so that they can be better prepared for college-level writing and build a strong skill set for their future careers?

How Students Can Take Initiative to Improve Their Own Writing

A great way that high school students can strengthen their writing skills outside of school is by doing a mentor-guided research project. Students can choose any topic that interests them, whether that’s in STEM, the humanities, or the arts. With the help of their mentor, students can hone in on a specific thesis or idea within their topic and find evidence to support their argument. Along the way, they can learn to find and analyze appropriate primary and secondary resources and how to properly cite these sources. The project then typically (but not always) culminates in a final research paper. What’s great is that this process is very similar to what’s expected of students in college-level academic writing. Because a research project focuses on a specific topic, students naturally have to do more in-depth analysis and build more nuanced arguments than the ones expected for high school essays. 

Furthermore, a mentor can help a student learn the technical aspects of their topic and provide writing feedback throughout the process. 

At Polygence, our core research program gives students the opportunity to work on a research project with the help of an expert mentor where they can produce a high quality research paper. 

Our Polygence alumni shared with us just how impactful the core research program can be for preparing them for college-level writing. For example, Rebeca Gutierrez-Sztarkman, a current Altman Scholar at Tulane University, found that “Writing a research paper through Polygence left me feeling more than prepared for college-level writing. I learned how to correctly navigate academic sources to be used in my research, which can be a daunting (but highly important) task. I also strengthened my ability to develop strong theses and arguments and synthesis of my research, skills that have helped me both in college-level writing as well as studying and other types of assignments.”

Furthermore, Polygence also offers the new UCI x GATI Independent Research Paper Writing Program. Students can take a university-level writing course while still in high school, produce a 7-12 page APA-style research paper, and gain access to the resources of a university library.

The current state of writing proficiency in the US should be concerning. High school students are struggling to write full essays and meet expectations for college-level writing. From a curriculum and policy standpoint, writing has historically been unfairly deprioritized, yet writing is one of the most important skills that our students can learn to help them think critically and excel in their future careers. 

We can help our students improve their writing skills during high school by encouraging them to seek feedback on their work from both AI tools and mentors, whether that’s assignments they’ve completed in school or writing they’ve done on their own. We should also encourage students to pursue research projects where they can communicate their ideas in writing and learn how to structure their arguments. 

We can help our students improve their writing skills during high school by encouraging them to seek feedback on their work from both AI tools and mentors, whether that’s assignments they’ve completed in school or writing they’ve done on their own. We should also encourage students to pursue research projects where they can communicate their ideas in writing and learn how to structure their arguments.