Cognitive processes in writing to learn

Writing is an important skill for enabling effective communication and as a tool for learning. The proposed project seeks to explore the cognitive processes taking place during writing and assess how these are related to learning and to text quality. It will do this by asking undergraduates to recall or summarize academic texts, and then assessing the effects of different ways of doing this on comprehension of the source texts. The project is designed to test the dual process model of writing (Galbraith and Baaijen, 2018), which claims that two writing processes are involved: a knowledge-constituting process and a knowledge-transforming process. These processes will be identified using analysis of keystrokes recorded during writing, using methods developed by Galbraith and Baaijen (2018). The effects of drafting strategies (either an outline or rough draft strategy) on the extent of these two processes during writing, and on their relationship with the learning of source texts will be assessed. The project will also assess how these effects are moderated by individual differences in working memory capacity. The advanced statistical method of Multilevel Structural Equation Modelling (MSEM) will be used to model the interrelationships between these variables and to test the predictions of the dual process model about them. The findings will have important implications for the use of writing as a tool for learning in educational settings and for the teaching of writing as effective communication.