GUEST POST: Learning Strategies for Academic Writing
By Jessica Costello
As an undergraduate at Stonehill College, Jessica Costello researched student and faculty knowledge of effective study techniques and sought a way to integrate empirically-supported learning techniques with the needs of the students she encountered as a writing tutor. She is currently working on her master’s in clinical counseling psychology at Assumption College and conducting research into recognizing emotional expression as well as the nature of serenity.
To researchers and educators in the fields of cognitive and educational psychology, it’s common knowledge that self-testing, distributed practice, and elaborative interrogation are some of the most useful study strategies insofar as they better promote retention of information (1). In most of the extant literature, researchers measure student retention with objective means like exam scores and the percentage of correctly-answered multiple-choice questions.
But we all know that students are regularly asked to complete more abstract tasks, such as answering an open response question, responding to a short essay prompt, or writing a twenty-page argumentative paper. Can the strategies recommended by Dunlosky et al. (2013) generalize to these open-ended assignments that don’t have one, measurable, concrete answer? While self-testing and distributed practice work well for, say, learning different mathematical concepts at once or learning terms for an upcoming psychology exam, open-ended, abstract assignments can be more subjective and require expanding the definitions of concepts like “learning” and “practice”.
A form of distributed practice may naturally be at work in the way most writers already write (2). In this study, participants had to both complete a sentence with an appropriate missing word and fix a grammatical error. When given the option, most writers chose to work on the bigger ideas of their sentences and paragraphs first, and would choose to fill in the missing word. They left smaller issues, such as misplaced punctuation marks, to be dealt with later. This research implies the strongest writers revise and edit in multiple rounds, focusing on a particular concern in each, and allowing themselves time to repeat the process if the need arises. In this form of spaced practice, material is not being memorized or learned in the traditional sense, but student writers are refining and improving their ideas in ways that will hopefully make the final product stronger.
While all of the specific strategies and tasks recommended by Dunlosky et al. (2013) might not translate perfectly from test-taking to paper-writing, studies show that the larger principles behind effective study strategies remain crucial to student success in writing. Namely, students who exhibit growth mindsets perform better, as do those who direct their own learning and writing habits.
As in any type of academic work, the overall keys to success in writing seem to be self-regulation (3) and metacognition (4).
Image from Pixabay
Hammann (2005) found a correlation between students’ self-regulation of their writing processes and students’ belief that writing skills could be learned, or that they could improve their skills. In other words, students who exhibit a growth mindset and believe they can improve if they put in the work will show more improvement and mastery over time than those with a fixed mindset, who might believe they are just bad at writing and will never get any better at the task, no matter how much they work at it.
Metacognition involves analysis and understanding of one’s own thought patterns (thinking about thinking). In the context of writing, a student writer who demonstrates high levels of metacognition will be able to understand the requirements of the task at hand and how to use his or her writing strategies in order to express the necessary ideas. According to a 2012 analysis of journals written by beginning composition students, the better students understood the expectations of a particular writing task, the more likely they were to demonstrate metacognition and answer the prompt successfully (4).
To further increase students’ comfort with different kinds of writing tasks, Kellogg and Whiteford (2009) recommend distributing various prompts throughout a standard curriculum, and insist that students practice writing deliberately (5). This way, they can become more independent writers and thinkers.
Image by fotografierende from Pixabay
Self-regulation also seems to be particularly useful for students who struggle with writing, those who fall into the fixed mindset trap of thinking they’re simply bad writers beyond help (6). Ideally, teachers and tutors can scaffold writing skills, acting as support until the students are ready to practice on their own and can work autonomously. Knowing they can regulate their own work strategies gives students the confidence they need to complete their work.
Though every instructor may have a different idea of what makes a compelling paper, learning to write is a crucial skill, the processes and strategies of which educational psychologists should examine in future research. After all, without strong writers, we wouldn’t be able to share our scientific findings with people who stand to benefit from them.
References
(1) Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, E.J., Nathan, M.J., & Willingham, D.T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
(2) Quinlan, T., Loncke, M., Leijten, M., & Van Waes, L. (2012). Coordinating the cognitive processes of writing: The role of the monitor. Written Communication, 29(3), 345-368. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088312451112
(3) Hammann, L. (2005). Self-regulation in academic writing tasks. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 17(1), 15-26.
(4) Negretti, R. (2012). Metacognition in student academic writing: A longitudinal study of metacognitive awareness and its relation to task perception, self-regulation, and evaluation of performance. Written Communication, 29(2), 142-179.
(5) Kellogg, R.T., & Whiteford, A.P. (2009). Training advanced writing skills: The case for deliberate practice. Educational Psychologist, 44(4), 250-266. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520903213600
(6) Mason, L.H., Harris, K.R., & Graham, S. (2011). Self-regulated strategy development for students with writing difficulties. Theory Into Practice, 50(1), 20-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2011.534922
