Domains of interest and ICT implementation in a questionnaire on writing
Submitted by:
Alisa Amir
Abstract:
Writing is often regarded as a challenging activity as it involves activation of regulation and strategies in the different phases of text production. It requires cognitive and meta cognitive engagement and demands motivational control. In other words, writers are required to plan, direct and evaluate their writing while coping with various meta cognitive processes. Despite the importance attributed to writing, in Israeli national exams writing performances of students indicate that they do not develop the essential writing skills to be successful at school - pointing out the rather basic level of students' writing skills. In a survey attached to these exams students expressed their dislike of writing activities, and writing lessons are experienced as boring and tiresome.
One of the ways to bridge over this lacuna is that teachers become familiar with students' stances, motivation and self-efficacy beliefs in different phases of writing. An effective way to do so is by utilizing questionnaires for self-reports on students' stances on writing processes. Quite a few questionnaires were developed for various purposes (see, De Smedt et al., 2018; Kieft et al., 2006, 2008), however, we did not find questionnaires which encompass the components of ICT and interest, i.e. interest domains of students.
The questionnaire can enable the teacher to form a data-based dialogue, relating to the students’ stances on writing, their interest domains, and accordingly to set special-interest-groups and suggest relevant writing topics. From the students’ perspective - in addition to the development of metacognitive awareness and self-regulation processes, the added components enable them to belong to an interest discourse community which operates in a technological environment in the process of writing.
We therefore, formulated a new questionnaire, based on existing questionnaires, and added two new components: domains of interest and the use of ICT in writing. The added components lean on Interest Theory (Hidi & Boscolo, 2006; Renninger & Hidi, 2016) and on the implementation of ICT in writing education (Avidov-Ungar & Amir, 2018).
We will present the process of the questionnaire adaptation and development, its validity and reliability, the rationale for the added components and teachers' evidence of utilizing the questionnaire.
Avidov-Ungar, O., & Amir, A. (2018). Development of a teacher questionnaire on the use of ICT tools to teach first language writing. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 31 (7), 675-693.
De Smedt ,et al. De Smedt F., Merchie, E., Barendse, M., Rosseel, Y., De Naeghel, J., & Van Keer, H. (2018). Cognitive and Motivational Challenges in Writing: Studying the Relation with Writing Performance Across Students' Gender and Achievement Level. Reading Research Quarterly, 53(2), 249-272.
Kieft, M., Rijlaarsdam, G., & van den Bergh, H. (2006). Writing as a learning tool: Testing the role of students’ writing strategies. European journal of psychology of education, 21(1), 17.
Renninger, K. A., Hidi, S. (2016). The power of interest for motivation and engagement. New York, NY: Routledge.