Angst About Academic Writing: Graduate Students At The Brink (original) (raw)

Graduate's Writing, Anxiety, Self-Efficacy, and Possible Solutions

2019

Graduate students face writing anxiety and low self-efficacy regarding writing research papers. Holladay (1981) addressed the negative characteristics of anxiety in graduate students by writing: "They are frightened by a demand for writing competency, they fear evaluation of their writing because they think they will be rated negatively, they avoid writing whenever possible, and when they are forced to write, they behave destructively" (as cited in Holmes, Waterbury, Battrinic, & Davis, 2018, p. 66). This chapter identifies several situations and repeating themes associated with writing anxiety, causes of low self-efficacy in research writing, and illustrates positive results from programs offered to assist graduate students in research paper writing.

Writing Apprehension among Graduate Students: Its Relationship to Self-Perceptions

Psychological Reports, 1999

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between scores on Daly and Miller's (1975a) Writing Apprehension Test and on seven dimensions of Neemann and Harter's (1986) Self-perception Profile for College Students. Participants were 97 students (81 women and 16 men) from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds enrolled in graduate courses in research methodology. Analysis indicated that students with the lowest perceived scholastic competence and perceived creativity tended to have the highest anxiety about writing. Recommendations for research include replication.

Academic Writing at the Graduate Level: Improving the Curriculum through Faculty Collaboration

Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 2013

This article describes a collaborative self-study undertaken to identify the source of academic writing difficulties among graduate students and find ways to address them. Ten faculty members in a college of education came together to define the problem and to analyze data gleaned from faculty and student surveys, course documents, course assignments, and course assessments. We found discrepancies between faculty and student perceptions about graduate preparation for academic writing and between the espoused and enacted curriculum. Both faculty and students identified problems associated with synthesizing theory and research. We discuss the need for teacher-scholars in today's educational environment, the challenges facing curriculum improvement, and several program-specific measures being undertaken to address identified gaps in academic writing and critical thinking.

AN ASSESSMENT OF ACADEMIC WRITING NEEDS OF GRADUATE STUDENTS

AN ASSESSMENT OF ACADEMIC WRITING NEEDS OF GRADUATE STUDENTS

This study mainly aimed at investigating the academic writing needs and writing self-efficacy beliefs of graduate students studying at an English-medium university, Ankara. Furthermore, such areas that have a crucial role in determining writing needs as the frequency of writing tasks, usefulness of written sources, perceived importance of academic writing, and role of Turkish while writing were explored. In this study, quantitative data via “Academic Writing Needs Assessment Survey for Graduate Students” were collected from 213 graduate students enrolled at Graduate School of Social Sciences. Descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis, and multiple regression analyses were employed to analyze the data. The results of descriptive statistics indicated that the graduate students need a wider vocabulary repertoire in order to cope with the challenges of academic writing and they are mostly assigned longer research papers. In addition, using journal articles published in the area of specialization during writing was the most common method and more than half of the graduate students stated that when stuck with finding the right word, they first look for a Turkish word first. The exploratory factor analysis produced two factors and the regression analyses were carried out. The results yielded that the predictors accounted for 24% of the variance in productivity-related academic writing needs, and 22% of the variance in accuracy-related academic writing needs. For the productivity-related academic writing needs, writing self-efficacy and academic status made a significant contribution and for the accuracy-related academic writing needs, writing self- efficacy and English proficiency exam score were significant.

Graduate students' perceptions of the academic writing process and its problems: A qualitative study in Turkey

Issues in Educational Research, 2022

Academic writing, which allows scientific research to be shared with other researchers, has an important place in graduate education because individuals at this stage of education gain experience in their fields with their academic writing experiences and are referred to as field experts when their education has been completed. At this point, graduate students' perception of academic writing and their experiences in this process are seen as an important element. The purpose of the current study is to examine graduate students' perceptions of the academic writing process and its problems. To this end, a phenomenological study design was adopted, with a purposive sampling to obtain participants for the study. Nine students who were attending a state university in Turkey volunteered to participate. Using a content analysis approach, perceptions of academic writing and the problems experienced in academic writing were derived from the responses to the interview questions. Results showed that graduate students' perceptions of academic writing fitted into five sub-themes: grammar, process, product, form and content. Problems experienced in academic writing were grouped under five sub-themes: text, mistake, competence, support and place of publication. In light of these findings, suggestions are offered about improving the acquisition of academic writing skills and confidence.

Introduction: Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines

2020

This project has been part of our lives for a long time. It began in 2011 when all the editors were working at the Michigan State University (MSU) Writing Center, Trixie Smith as the director and the rest of us as graduate students. Every day we found ourselves grappling with issues and ideas connected to graduate writers through our work at the writing center: working one-to-one with graduate writers, facilitating graduate writing groups, and offering workshops for graduate students, such as our Navigating the Ph.D. workshop series. The work was also personally relevant to most of us since we were graduate students at the time, frequently finding ourselves experiencing imposter syndrome and letting our identities as graduate students consume our lives. Little did we-excepting Trixie, perhaps-know then that our interest in graduate writing would intensify when we became junior faculty and found that we still faced many of the same writing-related concerns that we did as graduate students. Our motivations for developing this edited collection on graduate writing across the disciplines began when we turned from interacting with graduate writers to researching graduate writers and graduate writing. When the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department at MSU began an initiative to create research clusters that bring faculty, staff, and students together to engage in conducting academic research and developing publications, we decided that a research cluster focusing on graduate writing would be ideal. We participated in this Graduate Writing Research Cluster for the two years that we were all still at MSU and continued to collaborate when we began moving into faculty positions outside of MSU. Our collaboration culminated in a special issue of Across the Disciplines and this edited collection. What

Teaching writing in graduate school

2011

Graduate students are typically expected to know how to write. Those who write poorly are occasionally penalized, but little in-class attention is given to help students continue to develop and refine their writing skills. More often than not, writing courses at the graduate level are remedial programs designed for international students and others with significant challenges to writing. In this article,we describe theways in whichwe introduced writing into the curriculum of a master’s-level qualitative methods course. We structured the course around a semester-long research project that called for students to work in a team with others to improve both their research and writing. We share the strategies we used to demystify the writing process and encourage improvement, both in the course and beyond.