An Inquiry into Adolescents’ Experiences with Cognitively Demanding Writing: Time Investment and the Importance of Authenticity

In this paper, we describe our 12-month inquiry into understanding adolescents’ experiences, as they engaged in writing that challenged them to construct knowledge by making claims grounded in evidence and reasoning.While engaged in the task of writing a research paper, participants’ perceptions of time were two-fold in that they consistently identified a lack of time and a lack of understanding about the time the research paper demanded.We argue enabling students to have more temporal control over their writing is related to fostering increased metacognition about writing as a process.