Hall, Sophie Marie (2023) Estimating the effects of writing beliefs, writing processes and drafting strategies on the development of subjective understanding. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis, 276pp.
Abstract
The problem-solving accounts of writing (Flower & Hayes, 1981; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987) are the prominent underpinning theories within writing research. These models assume that writing is a problem-solving activity - the writer combines planning, translation and revision processes to achieve their rhetorical goals, and expert writing is assumed to be a knowledge transforming process in which rhetorical problem-solving leads to both higher quality text and the development of understanding.
The dual-process model of writing (Galbraith, 2009; Galbraith & Baaijen, 2018), accepts the idea that writing is a problem-solving process, but claims in addition that spontaneous text production also leads to the development of understanding. These two different processes have conflicting effects on text quality, which the dual process model claims can be resolved by using a revision drafting strategy. The essential contrast, therefore, between the problem-solving models and the dual-process model is over whether spontaneous text production is simply a knowledge telling process (as in the problem-solving models) or is an active knowledge constituting process (as in the dual-process model).
Only two published studies thus far have examined whether the dual-process view is an appropriate depiction of the components involved in writing in relation to the development of subjective understanding. Therefore, this project attempted to further investigate the model’s role in writing to learn by carrying out three studies: Study 1 examined individual differences in writing beliefs; study 2 described the development of reproducible measures of writing processes identified from keystrokes; study 3 used the methods developed in these two studies to carry out an experimental investigation of the effect of drafting strategies, writing beliefs and writing processes on the development of subjective understanding.
Study 1 used exploratory structural equation modelling to test whether a newly developed Writing Beliefs Inventory (WBI; Galbraith & Baaijen, in preparation) represented the five different types of writing beliefs (transmissional, transactional, planning, revision and audience) it claimed to, and to evaluate whether the structure of these beliefs was the same for writers with and without dyslexia. Responses to the WBI were collected from 493 university students without dyslexia and 68 students with dyslexia. The findings of the study indicated that a five-factor WBI structure was upheld across both groups of students. The results also suggested that dyslexic writers may prioritise planning, rhetorical goals and reporting accurate information within writing more than developing their implicit understanding of the writing topic.
Study 2 (N = 48) was a methodological study concerned with identifying reproducible methods analysing keystroke logs. It first presented a transparent framework for analysing keystroke data relating to writing processes. It then explored whether experimental manipulation of the writing process, to control how spontaneously individuals typed, could elicit differences in pause structure between the two groups (demonstrated with Gaussian Mixture Modelling), but these results were inconclusive. Finally, the study evaluated the reproducibility of two scales developed by Baaijen and Galbraith (2018) designed to measure writing processes corresponding to components of the dual-process model (global revision and sentence production). This analysis revealed that, with the exception of one indicator that had been analysed slightly differently, the two composite measures were reproduced, with very similar loadings, indicating the measures’ high reliability.
Finally, Study 3 combined the tools and methods examined and developed throughout Studies 1 and 2 to investigate whether writing beliefs, writing processes, and drafting strategies impacted the development of subjective understanding around a specific topic in university students’ essay writing. In an experimental task, participants (N=61) were assigned to either a synthetic planning with rough drafting or an outline planning with final drafting condition. The participants were required to plan and write an argumentative essay about a current affairs topic, but the two conditions were designed to either elicit or inhibit discovery processes. The results indicated that the conditions did not lead to variations in how much participants self-rated their development of subjective understanding during writing, and a clear impact of writing beliefs on subjective understanding was not observed. However, increases in subjective understanding were linked to more spontaneous sentence production processes. The projects’ findings as a whole provide preliminary support for the dual-process model’s explanation of subjective understanding development over the course of writing, indicating that an increase in understanding is relate...
More information
Identifiers
Catalogue record
Export record
Contributors
Download statistics
Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.