Resumen

DIFABIO DE ANGLAT, Hilda. Evaluating doctoral students’ conceptions on academic writing. Rev. Actual. Investig. Educ [online]. 2013, vol.13, n.3, pp.241-261. ISSN 1409-4703.

The purpose of this paper is to present a scale aimed to assessing the conceptions on academic writing of PhD students and to weight the psychometric qualities -reliability and discrimination of items- that enables sample size. It is made up of 33 items related to the nature and functions of writing and to the recursive strategies of planning, textualization, and revision: 24 translated into Spanish and adapted from standardized instruments, and 9  developed ad hoc. This set is divided into  two subscales: writing as  Elaboration (17 items) and as Reproduction (16 items). Using a pilot sample of 39 PhD students in Education of Argentina (Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, and Universidad Católica de Cuyo, at San Juan and San Luis), the instrument was self- administered, via email, with prior consent of the students. It showed considerable reliability indices according to Cronbach alpha: a coefficient of 0.93 for Elaboration subscale and of 0.91 for writing as Reproduction. It also showed that all the items of the first and 87.5% of the second are discriminative. Its potential usefulness is that conceptions on writing, a research area of poor development, have a strong mediating role in cognitive-linguistic processes, attitudes towards writing, and motivation; which also affect writing activities. Hence the need for doctoral students to replace the surface approaches (41% in our sample) by the deep one.

Palabras clave : academic writing; conceptions on writing; doctoral student; educational sciences; measurement scales development; Argentina.

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