The Influence of Sociocognitive Factors on the Quality of University Students' Writing
Abstract
The research covers the impact of instructions for carrying out written work, as well as attitudes, strategies and learning styles, on the quality of the written work produced by university students. We started out from an understanding of the social-cognitive nature of writing, namely, that the social, cultural context of the text, the objectives, personal characteristics and attitudes of the writer all have an influence on the writing process and
the written material produced. We worked with a sample of 489 students who were asked to produce an argumentative text and given two different sets of instructions. A table of criteria validated by experts was used to evaluate the work the students produced. The instrument used to measure different learning styles was an adapted version (Yániz & Villardón 2002) of the CHAEA (Alonso, Gallego & Honey, 1994) questionnaire. The EMAE
(Measurement Scale of Attitudes towards Writing (Álvarez, Villardón & Yániz, 2005) was used to identify the students’ attitudes towards writing. In order to identify what
strategies were used during the process of composition, students were asked to provide a chronological description of the ones that they employed.
The results of the research indicated that the quality of writing was pretty low. High
quality writing was associated to strategies employed such as planning, linking ideas and checking through written work plus a positive attitude towards writing, namely an enjoyment of the process and a recognition of it as an aid to reflection and learning.
Downloads
Original work publishes in this journal is subject to the following terms:
1. Murcia University Press (the publishing house) holds the copyright of the publishes work, and favours and allows their reutilization under the use license stated in point 2.
© Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de Murcia, 2015
2. Work is published in the electronic edition under a license (Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 4.0 España (legal text). They can be copied, used, disseminated, transmitted and publicly presented, as long as: i) authorship and original publication source is acknowledged (journal, publishing house and URL of the work); ii) are not used for commercial purposes; iii) the existence and specifications of this use license is stated.
3. Conditions for self-archive. Authors are allowed and encouraged to disseminate electronically the pre-pint (before review) and/or post-print (accepted for publication) versions of their work before their publication since that favours earlier circulation and dissemination resulting in an increased chance for the authors to be cited and for the work to reach a bigger share of the academic community. Colour: RoMEO: green.
