BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1706236
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Role of AI in Transforming Literacy: Insights into Reading and Writing ProcessesView all articles
Empowering GPT as a Processual Writer: Didactext-Guided Prompting Improves Knowledge Access, Iterative Revision, and Overall Textual Quality
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
- 2Universidad Andres Bello, Santiago, Chile
- 3Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
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Large language models are increasingly used as writing assistants, but their application often relies on holistic prompting that overlooks the recursive and cognitive dimensions of writing. This article investigates how guided prompting based on the Didactext model empowers GPT-4 to function as a processual writer, enhancing literacy processes in educational contexts. By decomposing writing into four recursive phases—knowledge access, planning, production, and revision—we demonstrate empirical improvements in reasoning depth, iterative refinement, and overall output quality. Building on GPT-4's advanced capabilities in multimodal reasoning and steerability, the study adopts a hybrid experimental design with 150 mini-essay titles generated under guided and unguided conditions. Overall, guided prompts achieved higher textual quality, with raters observing clearer structure, deeper reasoning, and more precise use of evidence. Bias analyses also indicated a reduction in stereotypical content, though not its total elimination. These findings offer novel evidence of how AI can be used to simulate human cognitive writing processes and support literacy development, particularly in the revision phase. Implications include the design of AI-powered tutoring tools capable of encouraging gradual and proactive writing practices while reducing bias in diverse linguistic contexts.
Keywords: gpt, Didactext framework, Processual Writing, Guided Prompting, text quality metrics, AI literacy
Received: 15 Sep 2025; Accepted: 22 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mateo-Girona, Kloss and Lillo-Fuentes. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Steffanie Kloss, steffanie.kloss@gmail.com
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