Abstract
In any academic institution, writing skills are essential to meet educational demands more importantly those who are in research field disciplines, the graduate students. Prior to their graduation, students faced the most challenging part of their academic life wherein they have to write a 150 pages research paper as a course requirement. Hence, they are inevitably exposed to the culture of writing throughout the course of the curriculum to develop their writing competency at higher level possible. With this, students are utilizing all the knowledge and skills gained throughout their academic years essential for their academic survival. Writing competencies involve the fundamental skills in outlining, summarizing, synthesizing, paraphrasing and developing paragraph. These competencies constitute a well-written output. This study utilized 57 graduate students taking TESL, Mathematics, Guidance and Counselling and Educational Management majors. To determine the respondents’ writing competencies, this study used the chi square method to measure the relationship between the academic performance and writing competencies and Likert Rating Scale with its quantitative descriptions and interpretation to determine the writing competency test results. It was found out that the graduate students obtained fairly good in outlining which has a mean of 3.25 ranked as number 1, developing paragraph with a mean of 3.22 described ranked as number 2 and paraphrasing with a mean of 2.68 . On the other hand, they perform satisfactory both in synthesizing which has a mean of 2.19 ranked as number 5 and in summarizing with a mean of 2.83 ranked as number 3. The writing competencies mastered by the graduate students affect their academic performance in research subject. It showed that students, whose writing competencies were fairly good, were most likely to excel academically. Furthermore, this study suggests that teachers should provide various activities, healthy feedbacks and constants guidance from which students could enhance and practice writing to improve their academic performance. Finally, teachers should give emphasis on the importance of writing by focusing subjects on research writing earlier before they enter college.
Author Information
Marilou Villas, Ubon Racthathani University, Thailand
Paper Information
Conference: ACE2013
Stream: Education
This paper is part of the ACE2013 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window
To cite this article:
Villas M. (2014) An Exploration of Graduate Students’ Writing Competencies in Educational Research ISSN: 2186-5892 – The Asian Conference on Education 2013 – Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/2186-5892.20130688
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/2186-5892.20130688
Comments
Powered by WP LinkPress