Psychology students transform their criteria to develop academic essays

Abstract

This article shows how psychology students changed their criteria for crafting an academic essay after taking a writing-intensive course. In college, essays are the typical writing requirement for humanities and social science majors. Students comply with the task without having the tools to write quality essay papers or in a way in which writing does not support learning. For this reason, we created a writing experience with the learning objectives of teaching students how to write academic essays and how to define the genre with all its characteristics. In our qualitative study we employed sociocultural theory, with six case studies. Our findings stress the importance of defining what an essay is, with all its features, and the relevance of working in pairs to conduct peer-review.