Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective

By Ronald T. Kellogg. 2008

813 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Writing skills typically develop over a course of more than two decades as a child matures and learns the craft of composition through late adolescence and into early adulthood. The novice writer progresses from a stage of knowledge-telling to a stage of knowledgetransforming characteristic of adult writers. Professional writers advance further to an expert stage of knowledge-crafting in which representations of the author's planned content, the text itself, and the prospective reader's interpretation of the text are routinely manipulated in working memory. Knowledge-transforming, and especially knowledge-crafting, arguably occur only when sufficient executive attention is available to provide a high degree of cognitive control over the maintenance of multiple representations of the text as well as planning conceptual content, generating text, and reviewing content and text. Because executive attention is limited in capacity, such control depends on reducing the working memory demands of these writing processes through maturation and learning. It is suggested that students might best learn writing skills through cognitive apprenticeship training programs that emphasize deliberate practice.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1211b5d1d88dfe320722e8b271b3cb34e4ad306

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Linguistic Features of Writing Quality (2010, background): “Along these same lines, many theories of writing focus on the effects of working memory, skill, and knowledge on writing ability (e.g., Kellogg, 2008; McCutchen, 2000; Swanson & Berninger, 1996).”
The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers (2025, neutral): “However, there are concerns that novice writers may become overly reliant on these tools, potentially impairing their long-term skill development by bypassing critical writing processes such as constructing logical arguments and understanding subject matter [14, 53, 63, 64].”
The Influence of Classroom Blogging on Elementary Student Writing (2011, background): “Looking at it from yet another perspective, acquiring audience awareness, especially the ability to anticipate the readers’ interpretation of the writer’s text, is a particularly challenging cognitive process to developing writers (Beal, 1996; Kellogg, 2008).”
Effectiveness of spelling interventions for learners with dyslexia: A meta-analysis and systematic review (2020, background): “Continued overload of cognitive resources during spelling may weaken the subsequent development of writing skills (Graham, Berninger, Abbott, Abbott, & Whitaker, 1997; Kellogg, 2008).”
A Study of Students' Assessment in Writing Skills of the English Language (2013, background): “(Kellogg, 2008) because writing helps to i) reinforce the grammatical structure, ii) enhance the students' vocabulary, iii) and assist other language skills such as reading, listening and speaking.”
Modeling Writing Development: Contribution of Transcription and Self-Regulation to Portuguese Students' Text Generation Quality (2013, background): “However, in the course of the school years, transcription becomes more efficient, reducing the cognitive effort required (Kellogg, 2008; McCutchen, 1988; Olive, Favart, Beauvais, & Beauvais, 2009).”
Trends in Research on Writing as a Learning Activity (2016, positive): “These new cognitive theories ascribed a high degree of agency to the writer, whose goals, motives, knowledge, strategies, and decisions determine the course of the writing process, and consequently the effect of writing on learning (Hayes, 2012; Kellogg, 2008; McCutchen et al., 2008).”