Profiling writers: analysis of writing dynamics among college students

We studied the processes involved in synthesis writing, focusing on planning, editing and self-regulation strategies. The aims of the study were a) to analyse the temporal distribution of cognitive strategies and self-regulation across the different phases of writing, b) to identify different writing approaches (i.e., profiles), and c) to establish the relationship between writing behavior and writing performance. Twenty-seven humanities students, who were 23 years of age on average, were asked to produce a synthesis. The methodology combined videotaped observations, a think aloud protocol, and an assessment of writing performance, and specific instruments were constructed to collect the data. Algorithms were also calculated to determine the transitions between different types of writing behavior. Results showed that the nature, frequency, and duration of planning, editing, and self-regulation strategies varied according to the phase (prewriting or writing), and the most remarkable changes occurred in the final period of writing. Moreover, although the college students’ functioning generally reflected a novice approach, there were significant differences between the three writer profiles we found, namely precise transcriber, active reviser, and spontaneous writer. Finally, writing performance was positively and significantly correlated with writing strategies such as taking notes and reading drafts.     

认知心理学视域中的写作过程

认知心理学从成熟写作者和初学写作的儿童两个维度研究写作过程.成熟写作者的写作过程主要体现在写作认知模型和个体--环境模型中,前者从认知角度揭示了写作过程的结构,后者强调写作过程是认知过程、动机、情感、工作记忆、长时记忆、环境诸因素的整合过程;初学写作的儿童对信息加工的能力有限,因而在写作中使用"提取-写作"的线性程序,其写作过程是知识陈述的过程.     

Widening access to writing support: beliefs about the writing process are key

Abstract

Universities’ performance indicators for scholarly outputs depend on academics having productive and sustainable writing behaviours. Research shows that writing programmes can increase research output, but less is known about which writing processes are productive. A project was initiated at a university which widened access to writing support to include staff who were not included in these performance targets, but who might be in the future. Following a writing for publication workshop, 36 academics were offered a place at a structured writing retreat. The evaluation aimed to increase our understanding of participants’ perceptions of their writing skills and processes before and after the retreat using a transactional model. We found that participants’ perceptions of their writing abilities were greater than their perceptions of their ability to employ effective writing practices. Both scores improved after the retreat. This finding confirms that a structured writing retreat provides an environment and structure for academics to practise effective writing. It enhances self-belief in the processes and skills required to produce output. Widening access to writing support for academics is essential for success in performance-based systems. Writing support must provide opportunities for academics to develop strong performance beliefs by practising writing skills and productive and sustainable writing processes.     

issues in Portfolio Assessment: Assessing Writing Processes From Their Products

We investigated the ways that portfolio evidence of students' competencies with writing processes was created and interpreted in 4 classrooms. Our study was conducted during preliminary classroom trials of California Learning Assessment System portfolios, when teachers and students were challenged with the new task of preparing portfolios that demonstrated students' competency with the "dimensions of learning." Drawing data from teacher and student interviews as well as portfolios, we considered three issues regarding the meaning of portfolio indicators of writing processes (a) Students' opportunities to learn to use a range of resources, processes, and standards in ways that enhance the effectiveness of their writing; (b) students' opportunities to produce "hard copy" evidence of their uses of processes; and (c) students' capacities to analyze their writing processes. Further research is needed to understand how participants in a large-scale portfolio assessment program develop shared understandings of the ways that evidence of writing processes is considered in the scoring and how the programmatic needs for comparability of evidence can be reconciled with the personal needs of young writers, whose uses of processes will vary with the purposes and contexts of their writing.     

Developing a community of research practice

Writing journal articles is essential for academics and professionals to develop their ideas, make an impact in their fields and progress in their careers. Research assessment makes successful performance in this form of writing even more important. This article describes a course on writing journal articles and draws on interviews with participants one year after the course in which they identified persistent challenges. These writers’ accounts make visible some of the processes of writing for publication that are often tacit and identify key writing strategies. However, they also identify barriers to writing in academic workplaces and those professional workplaces where academic writing is produced. This article concludes by suggesting that while research assessment values written outputs over almost everything else, it is equally important to legitimise writing processes—and to be able to articulate the development of these processes—in communities of research practice.     

Reading and writing to learn in secondary education: online processing activity and written products in summarizing and synthesizing tasks

The research reported here employed a multiple-case study methodology to assess the online cognitive and metacognitive activities of 15-year-old secondary students as they read informational texts and wrote a new text in order to learn, and the relation of these activities to the written products they were asked to generate. To investigate the influence of the task, students were required to perform two different tasks which differed in complexity and familiarity. The first task was reading a single text and making a written summary of it, while the second consisted in reading two texts and making a written synthesis of them. To gather information about how students construct meaning from informational texts, we asked students to think aloud as they read and wrote in order to provide us with information about their comprehension and composition processes. We also examined their reading and writing activities during the tasks. The results show that to a large extent secondary school students lack the cognitive and metacognitive processes that would enable them to make strategic use of reading and writing. They also show that, although there are no major differences in the way secondary school students tackle these different tasks, those who create the most elaborate products evidence a more recursive and flexible use of reading and writing. The most obvious conclusion as far as the repercussions of these findings are concerned is that there is an urgent need for work on tasks of this kind in the classroom.     

英语写作策略与写作认知过程的相关性研究

2007年3月至9月,笔者对内蒙古3所高校的168名大学二年级学生进行了问卷调查,目的是了解英语写作策略与写作认知过程之间的关系。通过典型相关分析发现：写作策略与写作认知过程之间存在中度相关。其中“组织思想策略”、“审题策略”、“检查策略”与写作策略（第一组典型变量）相关性较高;“确定目标”和“组织思想”两项与写作认知过程（第二组典型变量）相关性较高。     

再论大学英语写作

英语写作对中国大学生来说有一定的难度。怎样写好英语作文是近年来我国专家、学者和教师们讨论的热点问题。本文从中国大学生英语写作过程出发,重点论述影响写作过程的因素。     

基于工作过程的秘书写作教学观

基于工作过程的秘书写作教学是一种融教学过程和写作过程于一体的新型秘书写作教学方法。它要求按秘书成长规律和工作实际确定教学内容,按工作过程设计、组织情境教学,并构建与之一致的教学评价体系。     

Modeling Basic Writing Processes From Keystroke Logs

The goal of this study is to model pauses extracted from writing keystroke logs as a way of characterizing the processes students use in essay composition. Low‐level timing data were modeled, the interkey interval and its subtype, the intraword duration, thought to reflect processes associated with keyboarding skills and composition fluency. Heavy‐tailed probability distributions (lognormal and stable distributions) were fit to individual students' data. Both density functions fit reasonably well, and estimated parameters were found to be robust across prompts designed to assess student proficiency for the same writing purpose. In addition, estimated parameters for both density functions were statistically significantly associated with human essay scores after accounting for total time spent writing the essay, a result consistent with cognitive theory on the role of low‐level processes in writing.     

A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding College Writing Processes

The aims of this study were to confirm the factor structure of college writing processes as measured by the Inventory of College Composition, and to test for a second-order, deep and surface structure, as suggested in the literature on college learning and writing. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the dimensionality of the model based on the responses of 517 undergraduate students enrolled in general education courses. Results support the construct validity of the original model, as well as binary second-order factors, reflective of the deep and surface processes. Conclusions address the nature of the interrelationships of writing processes, and suggestions for instruction.     

Scientists' views of science,models of writing,and science writing practices

Written and oral communications and the processes of writing and reading are highly valued within the scientific community; scientists who communicate well are successful in gaining recognition and support from members of their own communities, the research funding agencies, and the wider society. Yet how do scientists achieve this proficiency? Are expert scientists equally expert writers in and of science? Do scientists' perceptions of the nature of science influence their writing strategies and processes, and their beliefs about the role of writing in knowledge construction? This study used a questionnaire and semistructured interviews to document these perceptions, strategies, processes, and beliefs in a nonrandom sample of Canadian university scientists and engineers. The results indicate that the scientists subscribed to a contemporary evaluativist view of science, used common writing strategies, held similar beliefs about scientific writing and nonscientific writing, and agreed that writing generates insights and clarifies ambiguity in science. The engineers held a different view of technology than the common views of science or technology as simply applied science. These findings were slightly different than those found for American scientists from a large land‐grant university. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 338–369, 2004     

What happens when I write? Pupils�� writing about writing

This article presents pupils?? awareness of writing as elicited through a metawriting task, in other words a task in which pupils from the third, fourth and sixth forms (grades) were required to write about writing. The analysis of the texts revealed the pupils?? increasing ability to write texts focusing on writing and on the subject??s relationship to writing. There are significant differences concerning the number of processes mobilised by the pupils to describe the writing process and the operations that take place within it. The increase in awareness is particularly salient in the case of planning during pre-writing. The pupils from the sixth form also mobilise a significantly higher number of processes concerned with the components of textualising (translating) and revising. The results for awareness of text and of reader do not present significant differences or any gradual increase. On the textual dimension, attention is given predominantly to the formal aspects of the texts, especially in the lower forms, while the emergence of other factors, such as genre, is still limited. As for the reader, this aspect of awareness receives the lowest number of associated processes when pupils write about their writing. The results revealed the dimensions and factors to which pupils in different school forms have conscious access when reflecting on their writing. The outcomes support the strategy of using metawriting as consciousness raising tool to increase pupils?? writing skills.     

The mind is not a black box: Children's ideas about the writing process

We studied children's conceptions of the writing process while the complex cognitive activity of writing is carried out through a pictorial representation of the writing process. Sixty children attending Kindergarten, first grade and fourth grade in Bariloche, Argentina, were presented individually with a sequence of four questions about the content of a child's thought at four key moments of writing production (anticipating, writing, revising, rereading), which were depicted on picture cards. Textual analysis, the application of Simple Correspondence Factorial Analysis (SCFA) and Modal Response procedures, indicated significant developmental changes in the focus of children's ideas about writing. More specifically, we looked at children's conceptions of the nature of thinking while writing, given cognitive processes of increasing complexity and internalization. Main educational implications indicate the need to rethink practices for teaching writing at initial and primary school levels in order to promote teaching interventions directed at getting pupils to be explicit, revise and redescribe their conceptions about the writing process. We suggest that learners' conceptions of writing processes outline a tacit learning curriculum of writing, which operates by guiding learning efforts and self-evaluation standards.     

国际汉语教学中写作方式对于写作效果影响的个案研究

如何提高汉语二语学习者的写作能力是国际汉语教学中一个重要的问题。本研究尝试通过一个小型实验,观察直接写作法、翻译写作法和提纲写作法这3种不同的写作方式对于3位写作者写作过程和写作成品的影响,分析3种写作方式各自的优缺点。研究结果显示,提纲写作法能比较好地平衡写作时间与作文质量之间的矛盾,具有一定的优势。研究同时发现,在西方二语写作中受到较高评价的翻译写作法并不适合于汉语二语学习者。     

A process model of writing development across the life span

In this article, we provide an overview of writing development from a product perspective and from a process perspective. Then we discuss modifications of the most influential process model of skilled adult writing to explain beginning and developing writing, including a proposed developmental sequence of the emergence of cognitive processes in writing. Next we report the results of two recent dissertations by the second and third authors supervised by the first author aimed toward contrasting developmental issues: (a) specifying the algorithms or rules of thumb beginning and developing writers may use during on-line planning; and (b) investigating the further development of writing processes among skilled adult writers. In the first study, development was conceptualized as a linear process across age groups. In the second study, development was conceptualized as a horizontal process within skilled adult writers who expanded their expertise. Finally, we consider the developmental constraints and the instructional constraints on writing development and argue for a model of writing development in which endogenous and exogenous process variables interact to determine the outcome of the writing development process.     

大学英语论说文教学的社会认知模式

以语类理论和Flower&Hayes的写作认知模型为理论指导,提出了一种针对大学英语论说文教学的社会认知教学模式。该模式倡导教师明确给学生讲授论说文写作中的思维过程,并将这种显性的思维教学与提高学生写作中的社会情境意识进行有机结合。     

Writing, thinking and computers

The author reviews the potential of word-processors for changing the ways in which writers process written text and, indeed, think about writing. He draws distinctions between different kinds of writing software and discusses whether changing the processes of writing necessarily leads to improvements in writing quality. The review also raises questions about the use of word-processors in examinations.