Mr. Waqas Sharif is an English Language Teaching (ELT) Professional, Trainer, and Course Instructor at a Public Sector Institute. He has more than ten years of Eng Language Teaching experience at the Graduate and Postgraduate level. His main interest is found in facilitating his students globally He wishes them to develop academic skills like Reading, Writing, and Communication mastery along with Basics of Functional Grammar, English Language, and Linguistics.
Narrative essays test your ability to build up a narrative in an engaging, well-structured way. They are much more personal and creative than other kinds of academic writing. Writing a personal statement for an application requires the same skills as a narrative essay.
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A descriptive essay provides a detailed sensory description of something. Like narrative essays, they allow you to be more creative than most academic writing, but they are more tightly focused than narrative essays. You might describe a specific place or object, rather than telling a whole story.
The vast majority of essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay. Almost all academic writing involves building up an argument, though other types of essay might be assigned in composition classes.
These higher-order thinking skills are needed for medical students to grow as successful medical professionals [4]. Doctors need to diagnose the problem of a patient, mentally represent the situation, plan appropriate treatments, and evaluate the whole process to check against other possibilities [5,6,7]. With limited research regarding the learning effects of writing in medical education, some medical schools make use of writing in their classrooms. By way of illustration, students of Maastricht College of Medicine are required to submit a portfolio that includes reflection papers on the roles and abilities of medical professionals, scientists, and health care providers, respectively [8]. Since these essays are written multiple times over semesters or years, students have the opportunity to reflect upon their whole learning process and look back on what they have learned.
Expanding previous research on the effect of writing on learning, students were tested on their transfer of knowledge as well as how well they remember the information. Following the second hypothesis, participants who learned through writing showed significantly higher performance in transfer type items than those who engaged in self-studying. Compared to students who just read the given material to comprehend and memorize the information, students who were involved in the writing task had to analyze what they had read and present what they had learned in their own words. Therefore, writing which requires higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis and evaluation, leads to a deeper level of learning [18] and a higher level of transfer of knowledge.
Results from further linear regression analysis imply similar conclusions (Table 4). Writing scores of both the SW and the AW group showed a weak positive correlation with performance in rote-memory and transfer type items (Table 3). However, linear regression results showed some different patterns on the effect of writing for the two writing groups (Fig. 1). While participants in the SW group achieved similar scores on transfer type items regardless of their writing scores, the test performance of participants in the AW group increased according to their writing scores. Since writing scores show a significant linear relationship with performance in transfer type items only in the AW condition, participants with poor writing skills in this group may not have benefited enough from the writing task. This also implies students who did not actively participate in the argumentative writing task may have lowered the average of the group performance, regardless of how argumentative writing promotes deeper learning than summary writing. Meanwhile, no significant relationship between writing and performance in transfer type items was found in the SW group, which suggests there was little individual variance in the learning effect of summary writing. Such different dynamics between the two different types of writing could have resulted in lower test scores in the AW group, or higher test scores in the SW group, bringing academic performance within the two writing groups to a similar level.
Last but not least, further analyses between RAT scores and the main study variables were performed to see whether creativity, or creative thinking which falls under higher-order thinking, is related to writing and final performance. RAT scores were only positively correlated with scores for rote-memory type items. This may be attributed to the fact that RAT focuses on measuring convergent thinking abilities, and not divergent thinking [28]. Creativity mainly consists of convergent thinking and divergent thinking; however, these two concepts are different. While convergent thinking skills involve the production of a single predetermined solution to a given problem like RAT, divergent thinking skills require the exploration of multiple possible solutions to generate creative ideas. In this sense, transfer type items that require the application of knowledge in various contexts may be closely related to divergent thinking than convergent thinking. The different focus of each assessment tool could have been the reason why the RAT did not show any significant correlations with the writing scores or performance in transfer type items.
This study, however, still has some limitations. First, overall performance scores showed a floor effect. Specifically for transfer type items, the mean score of the three groups ranged from 4 to 7 points, much below the maximum of 16 points. Such an effect could have been due to the unfamiliar subject matter or high difficulty level of the items, which were selected from the National teacher certification examination in Korea. Nevertheless, the writing groups achieved significantly higher scores in transfer type items compared to the SS group. For future studies, it would be meaningful to replicate our results with a larger sample size and materials more closely related to what medical students study within the curriculum. Also, a more relevant measure of cognitive processes involved with higher-order thinking must be considered. The task used in our study was the RAT, which assesses creativity, specifically convergent thinking skills. Since almost no significant correlations were found between RAT scores and the main study variables, implementing and explaining other measurements will help us better understand the cognitive processes behind the effect of writing on learning. Lastly, due to time constraints, we could not fully investigate the effect of writing on academic performance in the long run. As we have seen from the linear regression results, students with weaker argumentation skills may not have fully benefited from the writing activity. Thus, if we help students increase their argumentation skills and practice argumentative writing over several periods, the benefits of writing on learning may turn out to be bigger. In this sense, it would be worthy of investigating whether the AW group shows better performance than the SW group after more training, and experiment with what other long-term benefits writing can bring to the medical students.
Writing could be used as a useful learning tool that promotes higher-order thinking. As students have to analyze the given information and evaluate it to express their ideas in a compact piece of writing, higher-order thinking is promoted throughout the process. Therefore, our findings provide empirical evidence for writing to be adopted in medical classroom settings for greater benefits, in light of the transfer of knowledge. Overall, students who learned through writing showed a similar level of memorization with those who engaged in self-studying but higher performance in transfer type items. However, no particular difference in performance between SW and AW group was found, suggesting future studies are needed to identify what specific writing activities are helpful for medical school students. All in all, by actively using writing assignments in class, we expect medical students to acquire knowledge and foster higher-order thinking skills at the same time.
Listen to the first in a series of podcasts created by Eszter Racz, who studied MA International Multimedia Journalism at Newcastle University. The podcast series was part of a project funded by the Philip Robinson Bequest.In this podcast, students share their experiences of academic writing and some experts from across the University provide some useful tips and techniques.
Therefore, caution needs to be exercised when devising strategies to curb plagiarism among students in higher education. Some strategies that institutions of higher learning employ in dealing with plagiarism include: raising awareness about the dangers of plagiarism, taking disciplinary actions against plagiarists, and conducting or teaching students about integrity and what constitutes ethical academic writing (Ellis et al. 2018; Leask 2006; Macdonald and Carroll 2006; Ryan et al. 2009; Ryesky 2007).
The study established that many students plagiarised because they lacked academic writing skills as reported by students and academics, and by analysing reported common forms of plagiarism presented below (which emanate from lack of writing skills) and from follow up interviews. These results give credence to those reported by Scouller et al. (2008) who similarly found that students plagiarised due to lack of skills to paraphrase, summarise and reference properly. Like this study, Scouller et al. (2008), and Abdullah and Muhammad (2008) noted that students usually rate themselves as good at academic writing yet they unintentionally committed various forms of plagiarism. In this study, it was observed through follow-up interviews with an assistant librarian and academic staff that students lack good academic writing skills because they were not taught these skills because of a belief that they mastered these skills when they were doing their first degrees. The problem is that MZUNI recruits postgraduate students with diverse backgrounds, that is, from universities that may not have exposed students to good academic writing skills with perhaps a different referencing style from that in a particular department or faculty at MZUNI. In addition, the level and depth of academic writing at postgraduate level is quite different from that required at undergraduate level. Training is important because according to social cognitive learning theory which is informing this study, its element of modeling emphasises the need for guidance which helps transmit language, mores, social practices, and adaptive competencies. Modeling focuses on how well new behaviour is learned when the more experienced demonstrates the activity first then allows the learner to practise (Bandura 1999). In this context, students need to be taught good academic writing skills by academics or librarians because currently, their writing is based on trial-and-error experiences, which according to Bandura (1999) is very costly and unacceptable. Modeling can also be used to make an argument that students will easily learn to use citation software such as Zotero if they are trained or taught by academic staff and librarians. 2ff7e9595c
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