The impact of training students how to write introductions for academic essays: an exploratory,longitudinal study

Successful academic writing requires strong command of the rhetorical moves that orient the reader to the theme and substantive material of an academic essay. Effective control of the introduction leads to better overall writing. The goal of this study was to devise and evaluate a pedagogy for teaching the writing of academic essay introductions. The study employed a pre-, post-, and delayed post-test design in a single university student learning site. Student writing was scored on eight aspects related to (1) structure and content and (2) style. Confirmatory factor analysis reduced the eight scores aggregated into the two scales. A single two-hour workshop increased the participants’ (n = 87) performance in the rhetorical structure and content of their introductions, but not the style. A longitudinal model (n = 20) using three sets of parcelled scores showed that the structure and content of the introduction positively predicted the grade awarded by the student’s faculty. Direct instruction in writing introductions, through a relatively short, low-cost, genre-based training programme, appears to achieve significant student learning.