Improving Undergraduates’ and Postgraduates’ Academic Writing Skills with Strategy Training and Feedback

Anke Wischgoll

doi:10.3389/feduc.2017.00033

Abstract

To improve text quality in higher education, training writing strategies (i.e., text structure application, summarization, or language use) and provision of feedback for revising (i.e., informative tutoring feedback or try-again feedback) were tested in combination. The aim was to establish whether first, strategy training affects academic writing skills which promote coherence, second, whether undergraduates and postgraduates benefit differently from feedback for revising, and third, whether training text structure application strategy in combination with informative tutoring feedback was most effective for undergraduates’ text quality. Undergraduate and postgraduate students (N=212) participated in the two-hour experimental intervention study in a computer-based learning environment. Participants were divided into three groups and supported by a writing strategy training intervention (i.e., text structure knowledge application, summarization, or language use) which was modelled by a peer-student in a learning journal. Afterwards participants wrote an abstract of an empirical article. Half of each group received in a computer-based learning environment twice either try-again feedback or informative tutoring feedback while revising their drafts. Writing skills and text quality were assessed by items and ratings. Analyses of co-variance revealed that, first, text structure knowledge application strategy affected academic writing skills positively; second, feedback related to writing experience resulted in higher text quality: undergraduates benefitted from informative tutoring feedback, postgraduates from try-again feedback; and third, the combination of writing strategy and feedback was not significantly related to improved text quality.

Highlights

The writing performance of freshmen and even graduate students reveals a gap between writing skills learned at school and writing skills required at the college or university level (Kellogg and Whiteford, 2009): writers at school are able to transform their knowledge into a text that they can understand and use for their own benefit
The present study investigated the effects of cognitive writing strategies on academic writing skills and of feedback to foster monitoring the writing process on undergraduates’ and postgraduates’ text quality
The results show a significant difference between undergraduates who received informative tutoring feedback and undergraduates who received try-again feedback concerning the text quality of the abstract, F(1, 172) = 8.980, p = 0.003, η2p = 0.05

Summary

Introduction

The writing performance of freshmen and even graduate students reveals a gap between writing skills learned at school and writing skills required at the college or university level (Kellogg and Whiteford, 2009): writers at school are able to transform their knowledge into a text that they can understand and use for their own benefit. Several studies have shown that to improve writing, it is beneficial to train writing strategies and to support the writing process through feedback (Graham, 2006; Nelson and Schunn, 2009; Donker et al, 2014). Feedback that is administered adaptively to the current level of needs, can aim to increase the learner’s efforts to reduce the discrepancy between actual and desired performance (Hattie and Timperley, 2007; Shute, 2008)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion