Does technical writing build general cognitive maturity along with specific technical skills?
Yes. A growing body of psychological experiments and analysis (Chi, 1989; Girill, 2001; Stark, 2002; for example) shows that many students cannot learn well from worked examples even when the supply of examples is abundant. Example study techniques are not created equal. Cognitively immature students gain little far-transfer knowledge from examples because they fail to infer each example step from a general principle, infer the goal or role of a step from its content, or infer next steps from seen steps. Technical writing practice in general, and the shared exercises of this project in particular, focus student attention on just these sophistication-building example-elaboration moves. Students therefore gain the ability to learn more from every example that they encounter as they gradually work through well-designed and scaffolded examples of good and bad instructions and descriptions. These cases teach general example elaboration along with specific text analysis. Parallel comments ap
