Formación virtual en estrategias para la producción conceptual y escrita en el posgrado en Ciencias Sociales y Humanas

Abstract

Within an action-research project, and based on a diagnosis of student difficulties for academic writing, an entirely virtual workshop mediated by digital technologies (e- mail, blog, GoogleDocs), was cyclically designed, implemented, evaluated, adjusted and aimed to promoting the production of a chapter written by the student as part of his doctoral studies. This virtual workshop is conducted in accordance with a perspective that articulates technological, linguistic, cognitive and psycho-pedagogical dimensions. In this paper, preliminary results of the first cycle of design, implementation, and evaluation are reported. This cycle involved eleven doctoral students of Social Sciences and Humanities of different Argentine universities. Four instruments were applied in the diagnosis phase (cloze text, inventory of academic writing, questionnaire about conceptions on knowledge/learning and questionnaire about use of technologies for writing). Based on this diagnosis, a didactic sequence of eleven weeks was designed and implemented. Finally, final evaluation questionnaires were administered. The student’s assessments reveal that overall assessment of the proposed workshop is positive; on the other hand, they show an increase, which is related with the starting level, in regulation strategies of writing, conception of the writing task as elaboration, feelings of self-efficacy as a writer and self-perceived academic writing competence.