John Richard Hayes

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Department of Psychology

Although social psychologists have studied how people form impressions of others either through viewing them, listening to them speak, or reading written descriptions of them, researchers have not looked extensively at the ways in which readers form impressions of writers' personalities while reading their texts. This article reports on a series of...

Two experiments examined the relation between revision and task definition among college students in writing courses. In Experiment 1, students prompted to make global revisions to their drafts of college application letters improved their drafts more than students not prompted to make global revisions. Results of Experiment 1 extended results of D...

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In this article, we compare the Common Core State Standards in Writing to the Hayes cognitive model of writing, adapted to describe the performance of young and developing writers. Based on the comparison, we propose the inclusion of standards for motivation, goal setting, writing strategies, and attention by writers to the text they have just writ...

Writing in the workplace: Constructing documents using multiple digital sources Leijten, M., Van Waes, L., Schriver, K., & Hayes, J.R. (2014) Journal of Writing Research, 5(3), 285-337. http://www.jowr.org/Ccount/click.php?id=76 In today’s workplaces professional communication often involves constructing documents from multiple digital sources—i...

In Section 1 of this article, the author discusses the succession of models of adult writing that he and his colleagues have proposed from 1980 to the present. He notes the most important changes that differentiate earlier and later models and discusses reasons for the changes. In Section 2, he describes his recent efforts to model young children’s...

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 strateg...

University programs in engineering are required by accreditation boards such as ABET to demonstrate that students graduate with “an ability to communicate effectively.” However, universities have had difficulty with defining effective communication and with assessing whether students who complete their programs actually meet this requirement. In fa...

This is a ease study of users trying to carry out a task involving consumer electronics equipment. Many people blame themselves when they have difficulty using their VCRs or telephone answering machines. However, as this case study illustrates, the difficulty people experience in using such devices may be a natural consequence of the complexity of...

To be effective, writers must understand what knowledge they share with the audience and what they do not. Achieving this understanding is made difficult by the knowledge effect—a tendency of individuals to assume that their own knowledge is shared by others. Understanding the knowledge effect and methods for reducing it is potentially useful for u...

A number of studies have found that writers produce text in bursts of language. That is, when creating a text, writers produce a few words, pause, produce a few more words, pause, and so on. Chenoweth and Hayes (2003) hypothesized that language bursts occur when writers translate ideas in to new language. This study tested this hypothesis against t...

Engineering and science students need instruction in basic technical-writing skills. Typically, engineering and science faculty are not trained to teach writing and often they do not have the time to do so. In addition, universities may be reluctant to provide financial resources for such instruction. To help meet this need for basic technical-writ...

Generally, researchers agree that that verbal working memory plays an important role in cognitive processes involved in writing. However, there is disagreement about which cognitive processes make use of working memory. Kellogg has proposed that verbal working memory is involved in translating but not in editing or producing (i.e., typing) text. In...

Over the last quarter of a century, writing re-searchers in Europe and America have been making fairly steady progress in improving our understanding of the cognitive and social processes involved in writing. New theoreti-cal proposals have stimulated empirical stud-ies, and new empirical findings have led to the reformulation and improvement of th...

This chapter provides a brief review of empirical findings and theoretical positions concerning the conditions that lead writers to revise texts. The review identifies a need for further research in two directions. First, much of revision research is focused on revisions that are triggered by the discovery of text faults. More research is needed to...

This study explores the connection between writing and working memory, specifically the role of the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice). The authors asked the 18 participants to type sentences describing 24 multipanel cartoons. In some conditions, the participants were required to repeat a syllable continuously while writing. T...

This study explores the relation between fluency in writing and linguistic experience and provides information about the processes involved in written text composition. The authors conducted a think-aloud protocol study with native speakers of English who were learning French or German. Analysis reveals that as the writer's experience with the lang...

The authors of this volume, Alamargot and Chanquoy, have performed a very valuable service to the scientific community. They have searched out a very large number of theoretical contributions relevant to writing from a variety of fields including cognitive psychology, composition research, speech and linguistics. They have shown where these theoret...

This study addressed the question, “How consistently do students perform on holistically scored writing assignments?” Instructors from 13 introductory writing classes at two colleges were asked to provide essay sets written by their students in response to the three to five most important writing assignments in their classes. In all, 796 essays wer...

This reprinted chapter originally appeared in The Science of Writing: Theories, Methods, Individual Differences, and Applications , 1-27, 1996, C. M. Levy and S. Randall (Eds.). The following abstract of the original chapter appeared in record 1996-98203-001: (from the chapter) nearly 15 years have passed since the Hayes-Flower model of the writing...

In many literacy studies, it is important to establish the reliability of independent observers' judgments. Reliability most commonly is measured either by the percentage of agreement or the correlation between the observers' judgments. This article argues that the percentage of agreement measure is more difficult to interpret than are correlation...

This article describes an assessment carried out in collaboration with the administrators of a large freshman English course. The assessment team worked with instructors to identify course goals and to design tasks that the instructors felt would fairly assess the extent to which the students achieved the goals. Students who did and did not take th...

Possibly the simplest way to make a technical manual easier to use is a "user edit"---that is, having an inexperienced user try to work with a machine, using only its manual as a guide. His errors and hesitations should tell you where the weak points ...

provide a description of planning in writing that is reasonably precise and that allows us to characterize the relations among various treatments of planning in the writing literature / draw ideas about planning from the fields of cognitive psychology and computer science as well as from empirical studies of writers / begin with a general discussio...

Evaluates four writing samples from each student in several freshman composition courses. Finds that students did not perform consistently from one assignment to the next. Suggests that knowing how well a student performs on one writing task says very little about how well the student is likely to perform on other writing tasks. (RS)

Carnegie Mellon recently introduced a new curriculum that requires each engineering freshmen to elect two introductory engineering courses in the first year. The goal is to expose students to engineering disciplines as well as to engineering methods early. As part of this curriculum, we developed an introductory chemical engineering course to teach...

This report summarizes research conducted under contract No. 00014- 85-K-0423 on the nature of planning processes in writing. Section 1 presents a general characterization of planning based on an integration of planning research in the fields of A. I., cognitive science, and writing. This characterization provides a framework for studying planning...

This exploratory study investigates how writers represent their task to themselves before beginning to write. Using data from verbal protocols, we examine the initial plans of twelve writers (five experts and seven student writers) who were working on an expository writing task. The protocols were coded for types of planning. We also obtained indep...

“Creative” is a word with many uses. Sometimes it is used to describe the potential of persons to produce creative works whether or not they have produced any work as yet. Sometimes it is used to describe everyday behaviors as, for example, when a nursery school curriculum is said to encourage creative activities, such as drawing or storytelling. I...

Planning in writing is a strategic response to both the writing situation and the writer's own knowledge. This paper describes the process adult writers bring to ill-defined, expository tasks, such as writing essays, articles, reports and proposals. In planning, writers draw on (nest and integrate) three executive level strategies: knowledge-driven...

A review of research on the structure of writing processes shows that writing is goal directed, that goals are hierarchically organized, and that writers use 3 major processes—planning, sentence generation, and revision. The planning process is outlined in terms of the representation of knowledge, the source of the writing plan, and the use of stra...

Investigated the causes for large differences in difficulty of various isomorphic versions of the Tower of Hanoi problem in 6 experiments with 191 undergraduates. Since isomorphism rules out size of task domain as a determinant of relative difficulty, the present experiments identified causes for the differences in problem representation. Results s...

A new model of the revision process in written composition, based on the results of thinking aloud protocol studies, is presented in this report. The report begins by discussing earlier observations and theories of revision that establish four points: (1) there are large differences among writers in the amount of revising they do, (2) expert reviso...

Two studies were conducted to compare subjects' performance reading texts displayed on a computer terminal screen and on paper. In the first study, 10 graduate students read a 1,000-word article on knee injuries from "Science 83" magazine and were tested for recall of information on eight items. While subjects in the control condition (reading hard...

This article attempts to characterize the general problem of selecting methods for decision-making. The traditional rational approach to choice is from economics, which offers expected-value maximization. The task environment of decision method selection, however, does not seem to provide the data necessary for carrying out the expected-value calcu...

This examination of an evaluation of writing based on process rather than on product argues that one of the primary functions of evaluation as a part of teaching should be to diagnose the writing strategies that underlie a writer's current performance, not just textual problems. The first half of the paper discusses the various ways teachers use ev...

The act of composing is best described as a set of distinguishable processes that interact. There are four methods for researching these processes: (1) behavior protocols, in which subjects are observed but are not asked to report their thought processes verbally; (2) directed reports, in which subjects are asked to explain how they performed a tas...

Examination of consent forms being used by major hospitals in Pittsburgh suggested that there was considerable room for improvement. Thus, the major goal of this study was to produce a better consent form. Our revision focused on three major areas of concern: (1) meeting the needs of the people who use consent forms; (2) deciding how explicit to ma...

The three papers in this report set forth the research methodology and the theory used in one research project to identify the processes involved in writing. The first paper proposes a method, termed protocol analysis, for use in identifying the organization of writing processes. It defines protocol analysis as a means for examining the detailed se...

Examined the effects of information configuration, task demands, and cognitive bias on the organization of person knowledge in long-term memory in 3 experiments. 70 young adult Ss learned sets of person-attribute associations, organized either by person (John: cautious, reliable) or by attribute (cautious: John, Mary), and then retrieved selected i...

Two major factors have shaped writing research from the cognitive processing viewpoint. The first factor contains the strategic decisions about the course of such research, suggesting what is interesting and how best to proceed. The decisions made in regard to writing as a cognitive process have been to focus on the act of writing, to seek a proces...

This paper presents a tentative model of the writing process that has been developed according to the technique of protocol analysis. (A protocol is a description of the activities, ordered in time, in which a subject engages while performing a task.) The model identifies subprocesses of the composing process and their organization; minor variation...

Text: book; for undergraduates in cognitive psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

The difference between the performance of an expert and a novice seems not so much a matter of what the expert has been taught as of what he has learned by himself. That is, it often appears that the expert has taken the strategies taught him, and through practice has discovered ways to modify them into much more efficient and powerful procedures.

Forty-nine subjects judged the relevancy of sentence parts of a word problem (the Allsports problem). Patterns of subjects' judgments suggest three problem-solving heuristics: a SETS heuristic, a TIME heuristic, and a QUESTION heuristic. Presentation of the question before the problem tends to suppress the SETS and TIME heuristics. A computer progr...

Reports and analyzes evidence concerning assumptions incorporated in a previously designed computer program, UNDERSTAND, which incorporates a theory about human understanding of written instructions. 20 graduate students and college faculty members were presented with puzzle isomorphs, identical in formal structure but differing in "cover stories."...

This chapter discusses the role of notation-related imagery in mathematical problem solving. It explores the extent to which visual imagery penetrates into the structure of the problem solving process. The chapter presents work that is a mixture of subjective and objective methodologies. It discusses eight small empirical studies that constitute a...

This chapter discusses the child's conception of the experimenter. The child's understanding of subtle linguistic and social conventions can well influence his performance on tasks that are intended to measure his cognitive functioning. The understanding of linguistic conventions can well influence performance in the class inclusion problem. Childr...

In three experiments, Ss solved problems in which they were required to chain together “in their heads” facts committed to memory. Solution time was found to increase with the length of the problem, with the number of blind alleys, and with the length of blind alleys. The increases in solution time were more-than-proportional to the increases in pr...

In recent years there have been many studies of the tendency of animals to explore and manipulate their environments. While the analogy between manipulatory activity in animals and play in children has been recognized (2, 4), only a few experimental studies of play in children comparable to the animal studies have been reported (3, 7, 10, 15). Thes...

Whenever human beings must hear faint sounds in windy places, the masking effect of the noise caused by air turbulence in the ear canal can be a serious problem. We have measured this masking effect at several frequencies, wind velocities, and wind directions. We have also measured to what extent this masking is reduced by a windscreen for the ear.

Quantitative investigation of water and food intake of rats undergoing deprivation of one substance but with the other constantly present shows that food intake suffers as a result of water deprivation and that water intake is decreased as a function of food deprivation. When deprivation is terminated, the intake of the formerly deprived substance...