Kinds of Knowledge-Telling: Modeling Early Writing Development

The thesis of this article is that Bereiter and Scardamalia's (1987) knowledge-telling strategy may be viewed as a family of strategies. In particular, when young writers compose expository themes from their own knowledge, they may use one of three writing strategies: a flexible-focus strategy, a fixed-topic strategy, or a topic-elaboration strategy, all of which may be viewed as kinds of knowledge-telling. The article then proposes models to characterize the organization of cognitive processes in each strategy. The three writing strategies produce texts with identifiably different topical structures. Finally, the article provides evidence based on texts written by children in grades one through nine to indicate that the three strategies have distinct developmental trajectories.