This Writing Activity with Writing Analytics (WAWA) was developed as part of the doctoral research conducted by Sophie Abel, as part of the Academic Writing Analytics project at the University of Technology Sydney’s Connected Intelligence Centre.
High level literacy and written communication skills are essential for Higher Degree Research (HDR) students. Research funding restructures and new university policy drives mean that HDR students are now required to publish during their candidature rather than after. This has increased pressure on HDR students to write about their research effectively and quickly while also conducting research. However, most HDR students find writing difficult.
Issues of clarity, argument, expression and logic have been reported as key problems in HDR student writing. Writing Analytics (WA), is one approach that could be leveraged to help students improve their research writing. WA focuses on supporting student writing practices by providing formative feedback. This feedback allows the user to reflect on what they have written and revise their writing. Therefore, the aim of my research is to integrate WA tools in HDR research writing programs to help develop and improve research writing for HDR students. The outcome of this research is a writing analytics learning design framework in integrating WA in HDR writing programs and it will document an innovative approach to teach research writing in the Australian research training context.
The findings from my research will demonstrate how to better implement WA tools in research writing pedagogy to better support HDR students learn research writing so that they can produce quality writing.
