@inproceedings{chen-etal-2026-cpt,
    title = "{CPT}-Agent: A Cognitive Process Theory-driven Framework for Student Simulation in Writing Development",
    author = "Chen, Yuhan  and
      Shen, Zizhuo  and
      Cheng, Miaomiao  and
      Han, Xu  and
      Gong, Jiefu  and
      Wang, Shijin  and
      Song, Wei",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.846/",
    pages = "18596--18616",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "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."
}