ABSTRACT
For the past 2 decades, research on writing has focused primarily on reasoning and problem solving processes—a focus that would seem ideally relevant to the present concern with fostering students’ informal reasoning processes. In this chapter, I review the major trends in these studies of writing, and their implications for our current concerns. Rather than delivering an optimistic message about the ease with which we can refocus instruction, my major themes concern the difficulties involved: in calling for more attention to reasoning processes, we are really calling for a redefinition of the goals and philosophy of education in most classrooms. And while I heartily endorse this call, I expect such changes to be neither simple to formulate nor easy to implement.
