Our study examined whether brief writing-to-learn assignments linked to lower and higher levels in Bloom's taxonomy affected performance differentially on examination performance in assessing these skill levels. Using a quasi-random design, 91 undergraduate students in an introductory psychology class completed eight lower level and eight higher level writing assignments. We based both higher and lower level writing assignments on the same concepts drawn from chapters of the accompanying textbook but which differed in level of cognitive complexity. The results favored a top-down approach by showing that higher level writing assignments produced significantly better performance on both lower and higher level exam questions derived from concepts students had written about.