Determinants of ability to work with sources among international graduate students

The ability to work with academic sources and connect one’s work with the extant literature in the field is a key skill for many graduate students, especially those who are required to write a thesis. In addition, the discovery of source misuse, such as plagiarism, in the work submitted by graduate students can have dire consequences. However, direct instruction on this key skill of academic discourse is still somewhat rare and incidents of source misuse continue to occur across many graduate student contexts. There have been many valuable explorations of the learning experiences and processes that graduate students undergo as they learn how to work with academic source texts. This body of research has highlighted many potentially important factors that could impact graduate writers’ skills in source use; however, the majority of this research has been case-study based, and little research attention has been paid to quantitatively testing the theories developed from these case studies. In addition, most previous research focuses on authentic student texts produced as a part of coursework or as a thesis or dissertation. This methodological choice limits researchers’ ability to control the sources used by graduate writers and, as a result, valid evaluations of how those sources were used, misused, or ignored become more difficult. This study fills these gaps in the extant literature by quantitatively testing the impact of the various factors identified in previous research on graduate writers’ abilities to work with academic sources in a controlled writing task where the source material is provided and, therefore, controlled. This study explores the factors that determine graduate students’ ability to work with sources at the outset of their studies using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). This study proposes several PLS-SEMs that explore the impact of educational experiences and English proficiency on the ability to work with sources at the outset of a graduate program of study. Next, the factors that lead to development in these abilities are analyzed through interview-based qualitative data with three participants during their course of studies. These analyses include ratings on controlled source-based writing tasks administered at the outset of their studies and the end of their studies as well as analyses of the final theses submitted by the participants . The results of this study indicate that English proficiency is a strong predictor of the ability to plan and execute source-based texts, possibly lending credence to previous research that has suggested that source-based writing demands a heavy cognitive toll, which lower proficiency L2 writers may not be able to afford if producing text in the L2 already requires allocation of significant cognitive resources and that a certain level of L2 proficiency is required in order to successfully tackle source-based writing. In addition, previous education significantly impacted most aspects of the ability to work with sources. The amount of previous education or experience in source-based writing was found to increase with higher degrees earned and education in the social sciences as compared to other disciplinary domains. Further, the strength and the direction of this impact varied based on where the previous education had taken place. For those in the inner and outer circle countries according to Kachru’s categorization, more source-based education or experience resulted in higher ratings on the source-based writing task. For those educated in the expanding circle, however, more reported education or experience resulted in lower scores. This suggests that education is such countries may approach source-use in ways that differ from typical the Western conventions used in inner circle countries and many outer circle countries. The findings from the interviews and text analyses suggest that orientation toward participation in an academic community of practice or a professional community of practice that involves research activities can motivate students to endeavor to improve scientific writing skills such as source-based writing. These results and findings have implications for the training of graduate students who are expected to engage with the literature in their fields and the amount of time devoted in graduate programs to developing a sense of community membership among incoming students.