Exploring The Fundamental Cognitive Process Of Writing Ability

Composition writing is one of the most complex cognitive processing activities for human beings. Although the writing studies in the nearly twenty years mostly concentrate on the writing process: Planning, translating and reviewing, a lot of essential questions still have not been answered. In this study, we try to explore the fundamental cognitive process of composition writing. We will introduce PASS model as our basic theory, and using Das and Naglieri Cognitive Assessment System (DN: CAS) as our major assessing instrument.There is abundant theoretical and practical implication in our study of writing process and PASS theory. First, a full scale score and more significative planning, simultaneous processing, attention, successive processing score are offered to represent the cognitive ability. In that case, can we go deep into the cognitive processing characteristics of high-performance group and low-performance group of composition writing. Second, writing skills is one of the most important skills for middle-school students. Writing studies will contribute to the discipline instruction in middle schools.There were mainly two purposes in the present study. First was to expose the relationships between narrative writing and PASS cognitive processes. We introduce Planned Composition Task (Ashman & Das, 1980) to assessing participants' writing abilities. Expression, organization, wording, mechanics and individuality make up of the evaluation system for the composition. It's found that there is great consistency between PASS score and composition performance. The simultaneous processing is the best predictor of composition performance.Second was to examine the relationships between oral narrative and PASS cognitive processes. MacArthur Story Stem Battery (Bretherton, 1990) was used to estimate participants' oral ability. Length, information density, coherence, organization and individuality make up of the coding system. Finally, we found that there is great consistency between PASS score and oral narrative performance. The planning subscale is the best predictor of composition performance.