Academic Writing Groups in Higher Education: History and State of Play
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past twenty years, graduate studies have seen significant growth, with student numbers more than doubling worldwide. Unfortunately, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development continues to report dropout rates averaging 50% for PhD and 40% for master’s programs, in all disciplines combined. Among the reasons quoted for abandoning study programs are deficient academic writing competencies that could not only hinder how graduate students progress through their academic journey, but also how they integrate with the scientific community as novice scholars. Accordingly, this article will present an overview of studies related to academic writing groups, which have been identified as one of the strategies to benefit graduate studies. Based on a systematic literature review, we present a chronological account of key issues and concepts that have influenced the phenomenon throughout history. Thereafter, we explain the various characteristics of academic writing groups in order to delineate this phenomenon through the description of its inherent elements and propose an all-encompassing definition. The analysis of 72 documentary sources also allows the observation of trends through the examination of geographical, disciplinary, and methodological factors drawn from scholarly publications. Finally, we highlight considerations for future exploration of academic writing groups used as a pedagogical strategy in the context of higher education, from disciplinary, sociocultural, and gender perspectives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gpt | Scholarly communication Domain: not available · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | high |
| grok | Scholarly communication Domain: not available · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | high |
| opus | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | medium |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 3 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".