Investigating students’ changes of their academic writing skills throughout their study level
Résumé
The purpose of the present study was to assess post-secondary students’ self-perception of their academic writing skills depending on their university grade. More specifically, we investigated the changes occurring throughout study-levels regarding the students ‘ability to engage themselves in self-regulated writing strategies. Measures of metacognition and writing self-efficacy were collected through the use of three questionnaires. The MCPW-I (Escorcia & Gimenes, 2020) and QCMR (Escorcia & Fenouillet, 2018) asked students how they usually write academics writings. MCPW-I includes 30 items about students’ revising methods and QCMR includes 17 items about students’ planning methods. The third questionnaire, adapted from Bruning et al.'s SEWS (2013) includes 12 items about students’ self-efficacy in academic writing, and 6 items about students’ control of their writing behaviors. Currently, 134 students completed these questionnaires: 72 2nd-year undergraduates, 41 4th-year undergraduates, and 21 2nd-year post-graduates (data are still under collection). Results already show significant differences regarding students’ self-report of their academic writing skills: 2nd-year undergraduates reported being less aware of the criteria used to assess their writing productions which can impair their revision process compared to the other two groups; they also reported less conventions self-efficacy than the other two groups (i.e., efficiency regarding the use of writing language-related tools). Interestingly, data indicated that 2nd-year post-graduates stated engaging themselves to a lesser extent in covert self-regulation and time-management strategies compared to 2nd and 4th year undergraduates. These results are relevant to pinpoint the writing skills that need to be trained during the curriculum in order to promote students’ writing achievement.