“Write it Down!”—a Learning-Psychology-Based Analysis of the Use of Written Work in Economics Lessons

Abstract

To date, the use of written work in economics lessons at vocational colleges has been insufficiently researched. Relevant studies on this topic may be found primarily at primary or secondary school level. These studies demonstrate among other things that written work can have great significance for learning, retentiveness, and cognitive development. However, particularly because of the process of digitalization in schools, the amount of written work or writing tasks has dropped. The study at hand will examine the benefit of writing as a teaching method. Using learning-psychology-based findings on the processing of learning incentives by information models, the study focuses on the impact of writing by hand on the retention processes of the learners in economics lessons. To this end, two groups of learners are formed who will learn and repeat the material of a standardized lesson via different methods. One group writes the learned material down; the other group receives a handout containing the material. By means of short-term and long-term written learning outcome tests in the form of multiple choice, we obtain information about the knowledge retention effectiveness of written work in classroom teaching. We show that writing down, as a teaching method, does not lead to better absolute results in the learning outcome tests. However, in the long term, writing down does lead to fewer variances in the results of the learning outcome tests and thus to a more stable anchoring of knowledge in the learners’ longterm memory