Facilitating and hindering aspects in the writing process of undergraduate students

Abstract

Writing is a complex process with facilitating and hindering factors and sub processes. Students in higher education needs high level writing competences to deal with the vast amount of writing tasks they face in courses and when they write their theses. This study reports about undergraduate students’ conceptions of their writing process. Students in our sample (N = 308) took part in inquiry-based courses designed to improve their academic writing and research skills. They wrote research proposals from scientific sources, presenting and discussing them during the course. Our questionnaire measured six factors: writing as knowledge creation, others’ role in writing (feedback from peers and thinking of readers), productivity, perfectionism, procrastination and writing block. We used items from a standardized and published questionnaire (Lonka et al., 2014).
Our results show that more students considered important their mates’ feedback on their texts (79%) and their readers’ understanding of their texts (93%), than who didn’t. Few students viewed themselves productive and wrote often (17%). Half of the students don’t hesitate writing about their thoughts and don’t bother others how judges them. Starting the writing and finishing it until the deadlines seem difficult for many of the students (46% and 44%). Although, some reported, they can deal with these aspects of writing (26% and 25%). Answers on writing block shows that two-third of the students hadn’t earlier negative writing experiences, while the fifth of them had. More students reported that writing suits their mode of expression. Every fourth student reported that it is easier to express themselves in other ways than writing. The correlation analysis showed strong connections between the role of others in writing and knowledge creation (r=0,26). Correlation between the role of others and productivity appeared strong (r=0,34). Negative correlation was between the role of others in writing and perfectionism (r=-0,19), procrastination (r=-0,27), and writing block (r=-0,32). In addition, the results showed significant and strong correlation between procrastination and writing block (r=0,54), between perfectionism and procrastination (r=0,39), and between perfectionism and writing block (r=0,34). Students who recognize their strengths and weaknesses about their own writing process could bear with the tasks and problems during inquiry-based learning and research work. Students can learn and self-control their behaviour and writing effort, if they realize these aspects. If they learn to control this process, they could finish more written works and face with fewer problems, like dropouts from courses based on inquiry-based learning. In addition, their instructors and mentors can help this process if they know their students’ conceptions on writing.