DeMott: “To Err is Humane”
In the strategic planning of writing, Colins et al. make a distinction between knowledgetelling (where writing novices essentially write down the ideas they have, and simply stop when the ideas run out) and knowledge transforming “which incorporates the linear generation of text but is organized around a more complex structure of goal setting and problem solving.” Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1983, 1985) categorize planning into idea generation, idea improvement, idea elaboration, goal identification, and synthesis of “ideas into a cohesive whole.” (as cited in Colins, Holum & Brown, 1991, pp. 38-40). Scardamalia and Bereiter also offer subdivisions of the revision process, as well as prompts specific to each cognitive process. Positive results of this methodology showed that these practices produced “superior revisions for nearly every student and a tenfold increase in the frequency of idea-level revisions, without any decrease in stylistic revisions” (Colins, Holum & Brown, 1991, pp. 38-40). The systematic approach to the Cognitive Apprenticeship explored by Berryman debunked learning assumptions that hinder progress, including the ideas the students naturally transfer learning from one situation to the next, that students are empty vessels to be passively filled up, that learning is behavioural in that it operates on stimuli-response model, and that context of learning is immaterial. Berryman’s rebuke of such systematic errors proceeds to a call for the construction of “effective learning environments,” ones which employ the concept of the teacher as continuously practicing expert, the concept of sequencing which begins with students gaining an overall understanding of the “terrain before attending to details,” and a level of authenticity, called Sociology by Berryman, that gives due credit to the context in which a student will actually engage in the use of a skill (Berryman, 1991, n.p.). For whatever reason, the models provided thus far in the literature review: the cognitive, the concepts explored in language acquisition, and the cognitive writing process inherent in the
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