Accounting Students’ Planning, Writing, and Performance on a Time-Constrained Case Analysis: Effects of Self-Talk and Prior Achievement

Abstract

When writing a case analysis, most students first allocate time to plan the content and structure of their response, and then proceed to write with differing degrees of urgency, the outcomes of which are case responses of differing quality. This study examines the extent to which planning time influences writing urgency and, ultimately, the quality of case responses in a time-constrained setting. It also investigates whether these behaviors and outcomes depend on students’ frame of mind, by experimentally inducing differing types of pre-examination self-talk. Analyses show that planning time was negatively associated with writing urgency; students who spent more time planning subsequently wrote with less urgency. Writing urgency was positively associated with case response quality and, after controlling for differences in writing urgency, planning time was positively associated with response quality. Results indicate that different planning and writing behaviors can be induced by different forms of self-talk prior to the writing task. Relative to interrogative self-talk (“Will I …?”), exclamatory self-talk (“I will …!”) caused higher-achieving students to spend more time planning, but then write with less urgency and subsequently produce lower-quality case responses. Conversely, after engaging in exclamatory rather than interrogative self-talk, lower-achieving students spent less time planning but then wrote with greater urgency and produced higher-quality responses. These results indicate that (i) planning significantly affects writing and performance, (ii) students can influence their own planning behavior through pre-task self-talk, but (iii) pre-task self-talk can be beneficial or detrimental depending on students’ prior achievement.