Advances in cognitive science have greatly increased our knowledge of how the human mind stores and uses information. That knowledge can be used to decompose curricular objectives so as to increase the specificity of instruction to a level of precision that should greatly enhance student writing. This article identifies some major types of cognitive structure and describes how they might be used in the process of decomposing curricular objectives. The two primary types of linguistic information are declarative (factual) and procedural. Declarative information can be subdivided into four basic types: concepts, facts, principles, and schemata. Procedural information includes process knowledge and conditional knowledge (or knowledge about when to use specific procedures). Both types of information are commonly stored in long-term memory in cognitive structures called "productions," which sometimes have associated terminology and symbols. This model for specifying the cognitive components of a given curricular objective is then applied to the objective of teaching students to read and interpret a bar graph. In laboratory tests, this process of decomposing curricular objectives has shown great promise for helping teachers to specify and plan instruction, and thereby to enhance student learning. (TE)