Furthermore, the Writing Intensive Program emphasizes that writing is an invaluable heuristic of learning. Writing deepens involvement in intellectual tasks. Admittedly, using writing to help students enjoy their learning may seem like a novel idea, even a contrarian one. Here, we emphasize that it is not only the amount of writing in a course that increases engagement and makes for a more meaningful intellectual experience, although adding some writing instead of none is beneficial, but it is also the degree of engagement with the writing process that a course permits that involves students on a deeper and more satisfying level. It requires goal setting, thoughtful analysis and organization, self-monitoring, evaluation in terms of goals, and strategic adjustment, all metacognitive skills that require thinking effectively about one's own thinking.
Problem solving and critical thinking are two main metaphors for the writing process.
In fact, an understanding of writing as a metacognitive process of problem solving and critical thinking forms the common ground of programs like the WIP, which emphasize writing's role in learning through these metaphors. As one mathematician writes, The use of writing as a problem solving method allows the students to assume a more active role in the problem solving process, and cognitive learning becomes more effective. Problem solving requires the utilization and restructuring of higher level cognitive skills and knowledge. Cognitive psychologists Linda Flower and John Hayes were the first to import this understanding into composition studies, and they have mapped writing usefully as a problem solving process that entails critical thinking. Just as writing skills are problem solving skills, and vice versa, writing skills are critical thinking skills.