The Impact of Self-assessment of Engineering Students’ Awareness of Pre-Writing Strategies on Writing Performance

Ramya Devi Bommanaboina, Rajakumar Guduru

Abstract


Success in academic writing is achieved when students adhere to a process approach to writing. In the Indian context, a typical classroom of engineering students is heterogeneous in nature. Majority of engineering students has disadvantaged backgrounds coming from rural and semi-urban places from across India. For such students, mastery over English language skills, particularly writing in English in the academic context, is still a major issue. The researchers of this study hypothesize that students’ self-assessment of writing skills positively contributes to their own writing performance. The main aim of this study is to investigate the effects of self-assessment on the reflective skills of entry level undergraduate learners in writing. To achieve this goal, a self-assessment questionnaire was administered and informal interviews were conducted to 439 first year undergraduate students at IIT Bhubaneswar, India. The questionnaire assessed the awareness of learners towards idea generation and idea organization strategies in writing. The quantitative analysis and interpretation of the data showed that there is significant correlation between students’ awareness of strategies and their performance on the written tasks. The results of the Independent-samples t-test showed that there is no statistically significant difference between male and female students with regard to their awareness of writing strategies. Finally, implications of the study, including the need for improving personal writing activities and academic writing, are discussed and recommended.


Keywords


awareness, engineering students, pre-writing strategies, self-assessment

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References


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