Towards scaffolding self-regulated writing: implications for developing writing interventions in first-year writing

Writing is a crucial, interdisciplinary skill that incoming college students need to successfully complete many of the tasks assigned within their coursework. While teaching self-regulation skills for writing has become more commonplace in writing curricula, and research has investigated how students have been impacted by a writing-about-writing curriculum or how they write in the classroom and perceive their use of self-regulatory strategies, there is not as much research combining these approaches. We argue it is important to investigate the ways that students are impacted by this curriculum and how they perceive their own self-regulated writing behaviors—particularly as evidence by how students write in real-time using multimodal data channels. As such, one goal of this paper is to highlight our approach to investigating college students’ ( n = 62) writing processes as they responded to a written self-reflective prompt. Based on students’ written responses, we discovered four student clusters and compared their keystroke-logging behavior using a one-way MANOVA, with post-hoc analyses revealing significant differences between production and revision behavior between some clusters, but no differences in pausing behavior. In addition, another goal of this paper is to derive recommendations for the design of scaffolding based on the results of this empirical study, which imply that scaffolded support should focus on particular phases of self-regulation for different groups of students. Future studies are needed to test the most beneficial ways to scaffold students to ensure they are engaging in effective writing strategies that promote higher levels of metacognitive awareness of one’s writing to ensure students are effective writers throughout their years in college and beyond.