An intervention using digital social media to support academic writing of university students: a case study

An intervention using digital social media to support academic writing of university students: a case study

Many university students, both native and non-native speakers of English, seek ongoing discipline-based academic writing support. However, this type of support within the university sector has yet to be broadly implemented due to cost and practical concerns. their overall academic performance. The effects of using digital social media as a platform in providing academic writing support for university students was investigated within this research. The research also intended to investigate university -efficacy beliefs in this context. It is believed that self-efficacy functions as a significant predictor of academic writing performance. This study included three main phases pre-intervention, intervention and post-intervention—with 25 university students from a regional Australian university. A case study method was incorporated that accompanied quantitative and qualitative methods within an overall qualitative design. Self-efficacy questionnaires, interviews and field notes were used to collect data in this study. The intervention phase provided the participants with academic writing support by the researcher via digital social media for four weeks. The analysed data of this case study showed improvement in the participants’ academic writing self-efficacy beliefs after the academic writing support they gained during the intervention phase. The reason for this improvement can be found in the use of a digital social media platform that enabled the provision of discipline-based academic writing support when the participants needed it most. The results suggest that digital social media may be a beneficial platform for providing ongoing discipline-based academic writing support for university students.