CPT-Agent: A Cognitive Process Theory-driven Framework for Student Simulation in Writing Development
Yuhan Chen Capital Normal University, Zizhuo Shen Beijing Language and Culture University and IFLYTEK CO.LTD., Miaomiao Cheng, Xu Han, Jiefu Gong IFLYTEK CO.LTD., Shijin Wang State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, Wei Song Capital Normal University
Simulating student writing behavior offers a promising pathway to scalable feedback evaluation and teacher training. However, existing LLM-based approaches tend to model overly capable learners who readily understand and over-apply feedback, resulting in pedagogically implausible behavior. In this work, we introduce pedagogical realism as a guiding principle for student writing simulation, emphasizing bounded cognition, selective feedback comprehension, and developmentally plausible learning processes. To operationalize this idea, we propose CPT-Agent, a cognitively grounded framework that decouples cognitive ability from writing proficiency and models their interaction during writing and revision. CPT-Agent combines probabilistic modeling of cognitive development, proficiency-controlled text generation, and structured memory for skill accumulation. Experiments show that it (1) produces clearly distinguishable proficiency levels, (2) generates cognitively plausible revisions consistent with instructional theories, and (3) achieves strong agreement with expert judgments in evaluating feedback quality. These results highlight the importance of modeling cognitive constraints in LLM-based student simulation and demonstrate the potential of pedagogically realistic agents for automated feedback assessment and teacher development.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表