Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
TO HAVE YOUR DARLINGS KILLED: THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL OWNERSHIP ON THE PROCESSING OF FEEDBACK IN WRITING GROUPS
Angeniet Kam
Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Writers often experience psychological ownership towards their text (Spigelman, 2000, Pierce and Jussila, 2011). A negative effect of this psychological ownership may be that suggestions for improvement are not adopted (Baer and Brown, 2012). This may explain why it is difficult for beginning academic writers to adopt the feedback on their texts, a problem many teachers of academic writing share (Spigelman, 2000; Duijnhouwer, 2010). This presentation will show the results of a study into the relation between psychological ownership and revision of texts in writing groups. Two questionnaires were conducted about giving and receiving feedback among second year Aerospace Engineering students of Delft University of Technology (n=218). The results show that there is a moderate but significant statistical relation between psychological ownership and the quality of the feedback. Furthermore, a qualitative text analysis is currently performed in which three hypotheses are investigated: (1) writing groups with a high score on textual ownership adopt less suggestions for deletion than writing groups with a lower score on textual ownership; (2) writing groups with a high score on textual ownership adopt less points of feedback on higher order concerns than writing groups with a lower score on textual ownership; (3) a high amount of feedback and/or very detailed feedback has a negative effect on the adoption of feedback by writing groups with a high score on textual ownership. If these effects can be shown, it may be necessary to address this in writing pedagogy, to help academic writers to kill their textual darlings.
References
Baer, M. and Brown, G. (2012) Blind in one eye: How psychological ownership of ideas affects the types of suggestions people adopt. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 6071.
Duijnhouwer, H. (2010). Feedback effects on students’ writing motivation, process and performing. Utrecht: ICO. Pierce, J.L. and Jussila, I. (2011) Psychological Ownership and the Organizational Context. Cheltenham/Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing. Spigelman, C. (2000). Across Property Lines. Textual Ownership in Writing Groups. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.