A Study Of Students' Self-regulated Revision On English Writing From A Socio-cognitive Perspective

Student writing development is not likely to happen without revision.In this computer-assisted learning era,revision is increasingly practiced as a self-regulated process.Students can regulate their revision behaviors through cognitive strategies like goal-setting or social strategies like peer review.Rooted in the cognitive or social stance,previous literature only addressed goal-setting's effects and peer review's effects on revision separately.Those studies do not consider the fact that revision is both goal-driven and peer-interactive in a socio-cognitive view of writing self-regulation.Based on the socio-cognitive view of self-regulated writing,our study integrated two previous research strands of writing goals' effects on revision and peer review's effects on revision.We examined possible influences of writing goals together with peer review on college students' self-regulated revision in order to better understand how to enhance that revision.We asked three research questions in particular.What kinds and effects of revisions did students produce in the digital learning context of the current study? What kinds of writing goals and peer review insights did students generate? How did revision relate qualitatively and quantitatively to writing goals and peer review?In terms of research design,our study elicited students' self-initiated goals in textual format,thus making it possible to trace revision from their personal writing goals.In addition,peer review as a social strategy,involves opportunities to learn from both receiving and providing feedback.In the current study,peer review insights were elicited including both peer comments on student papers,and reflections on peer papers.Both could be important sources of self-regulated revision.135 U.S.college students participated in this study.During the 16-week semester,students were instructed to write two papers(with writing goals written at the end),each in two drafts.When they finished writing each draft,they submitted documents into an online writing and peer review system(Peerceptiv),reviewed peer papers,gave required comments and ratings,wrote reflections based on peer review,and then revised and resubmitted their drafts.We found that students made targeted revisions in both high-level content issues and low-level grammar issues.High level revisions occupied a bigger percentage in terms of changes of sentence numbers.Revision-caused writing score improvement was not tremendous,but statistically significant.On the social cognitive strategies of the self-regulated revision,we examined writing goals and peer review insights.About writing goals,we found that(a)students tended to create more high-level substantive goals and(b)their writing goals were divided into three categories: general writing goals,genre writing goals,and assignment goals.About peer review,we found that students made more peer comments than required,and that peer comments often pointed to the same problem in peer writing.Self-reflections from peer review tended to be short imperative sentences,indicating a strong intention to revise.We further coded the overlap between revisions and the two social cognitive strategies.Findings suggest that high-level revisions are commonly associated with writing goals,are especially likely to occur for combinations of the social cognitive strategies,and peer comments alone appeared to make the largest contributions to revision.Most revisions,especially high-level revisions,can be traced from the social cognitive sources of regulation strategies under examination.Our study suggests that writing goals guide revision efforts and can do so in combination with peer review.The present results have important pedagogical implications for courses with writing as a primary element.Since goal setting and peer review as social cognitive strategies do contribute to substantial revision,teachers could consider using these strategies in multiple draft writing assignments as important sources of information about students' revision intentions,so as to provide more effective instructive guidance.Built on a social cognitive view of writing self-regulation,our study is a first attempt to investigate the triadic interaction of goal setting,peer review and revision.The findings suggest the optimal achievement of self-regulated revision through the use of two social cognitive strategies.This work also uncovers a new perspective on how a combination of social cognitive strategies can be explored to contribute to the understanding of students' self-regulated writing.