The impact of three types of writing intervention on students' writing quality.

Students' writing constitutes a topic of major concern due to its importance in school and in daily life. To mitigate students' writing problems, school-based interventions have been implemented in the past, but there is still a need to examine the effectiveness of different types of writing interventions that use robust design methodologies. Hence, the present study followed a longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled design using a multilevel modeling analysis with 370 fourth-grade students (nested in 20 classes). The classes were randomly assigned to four conditions: one comparison group and three writing types of writing interventions (i.e., week-journals, Self-Regulation Strategy Development (SRSD) instruction and SRSD plus Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) program using a story-tool), with five classes participating in each condition. Data supports our hypothesis by showing differences between the treatment groups in students' writing quality over time. Globally, the improvement of students' writing quality throughout time is related to the level of specialization of the writing interventions implemented. This is an important finding with strong implications for educational practice. Week-journals and writing activities can be easily implemented in classrooms and provides an opportunity to promote students' writing quality. Still, students who participated in the instructional programs (i.e., SRSD and SRSD plus story-tool) exhibited higher writing quality than the students who wrote week-journals. Current data did not find statistical significant differences between results from the two instructional writing tools.

Propiedades psicométricas de la versión mexicana del Cuestionario para la Evaluación de Metas Académicas (CEMA) / Psychometric properties of the Mexican version of the Academic Goals Questionnaire

Las metas académicas constituyen una de las variables más importantes desde el punto de vista motivacional para explicar las diferentes razones de que los estudiantes se impliquen en las tareas y actividades de aprendizaje. Al mismo tiempo, están relacionadas con distintos patrones de pensamiento, emociones y acciones de los estudiantes y, además, con su logro académico. De ahí la importancia de incrementar los trabajos empíricos en esta área y contar con instrumentos de evaluación que permitan una mayor comprensión de los procesos involucrados en el aprendizaje de los estudiantes, particularmente en la enseñanza superior. Es por ello que en este trabajo se examinan las propiedades psicométricas del Cuestionario para la Evaluación de Metas Académicas en una muestra de estudiantes universitarios mexicanos. Este instrumento de autoinforme valora la orientación personal de los estudiantes hacia las metas académicas. Para ello, se llevó a cabo un análisis factorial confirmatorio (AFC) con una muestra de 735 estudiantes universitarios mexicanos del área de ingenierías. Los resultados obtenidos corroboran en general la estructura factorial del cuestionario original y garantizan suficientemente la consistencia interna de la escala para emplearla en la investigación dentro del contexto mexicano.

Academic goals are one of the most important variables from a motivational point of view to explain the different reasons and motives of students to get involved in learning tasks and activities. At the same time, academic goals are related to different patterns of thoughts, emotions and actions of students, as well as their academic achievement. Hence, it is important to develop empirical work in this area in order to construct evaluation tools that allow a better understanding of the processes involved in student learning, particularly in higher education. The psychometric properties of the Questionnaire for the Evaluation of Academic Goals were examined in a sample of Mexican university students. This self-report instrument evaluates the personal orientation of the student towards academic goals. To achieve this goal, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted, with a sample of 735 Mexican higher education students in the engineering area. Findings corroborate the original questionnaire factor structure and demonstrates reliability for using the scale in the research within the Mexican context.