The influence of students' perceptions of writing on academic writing performance

Abstract

Analysis of The Nation's Report Card (NAEP, 2011) indicates low performance by adolescent students in the area of academic writing, which in turn suggests that students in the elementary grades are not developing the writing skills that will enable them to write successfully as adolescents. Academic writing involves specific expectations for structure, content, and conventions. While students learn these expectations, students' perceptions of writing may also impact their academic writing performance. Therefore, to address this problem of students' low academic writing performance, an appropriate research question is, what are fourth grade students' perceptions of writing and what is the influence of those perceptions on their academic writing performance? This question of perception and influence is appropriately addressed by conducting an empirical study with fourth grade participants and a mixed methodology to determine specific perceptions and their relationship to writing performance. After measuring academic writing performance and collecting data on perception attitude, self-efficacy, and writing knowledge, analysis has produced three findings. First is that although these participants all had the same teachers and writing instruction throughout their elementary schooling, their perceptions of writing are not consistent with each other but range as do their academic writing performances. Second is that their knowledge of "writing" appears to be primarily focused on an academic concept of writing, and the third finding is that the relationship between perception and performance appears to have a linear correlation, with neutral attitude and neutral self-efficacy producing below average to average writing performance. [from abstract]