ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1494111
A Thematic-Cognitive Perspective for Exploring the Writing Skills of Children: A Textual Analysis Using ENA
Provisionally accepted
- 1Hubei University, Wuhan, China
- 2Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
- 3Wuhan Changqingshu Experimental School, Wuhan, China
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Primary school is a critical period for the development of children's language proficiency, coinciding with rapid cognitive growth that supports the emergence of written expression skills. This study employed epistemic network analysis to encode and examine six years of student writing data, constructing cognitive network maps to explore overall developmental patterns, as well as differences across grade levels and genders from both subject matter and cognitive perspectives. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of epistemic network analysis in processing and visually representing the cognitive features embedded in written texts. Children's writing showed distinct patterns based on subject, grade, and gender, revealing a complex and multifaceted cognitive network structure.Understanding these nuances is essential, as awareness of subject-specific, developmental, and gender-related cognitive differences can provide educators with Running Title valuable insights for designing more effective and personalized writing instruction.
Keywords: Writing ability, epistemic network analysis, writing education, Children, Writing topic
Received: 10 Sep 2024; Accepted: 15 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, GOH, Chen, Chen, Yang, Pan and Song. 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: Dexin Chen, Hubei University, Wuhan, China
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