ComposeMe: Designing Technology to Reduce Academic Writing Anxiety and Increase Attention in Higher Education
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2021
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://yidanprize.org/knowledge-hub/publication/2021-yidan-prize-doctoral-conference-proceedings
Abstract
Attention has a big role to play in various kinds of learning but all learners have different constraints on their attention, anxiety being one of the most debilitating ones. Anxiety causes students difficulty in allocating adequate attention for learning tasks that are expected of them in higher education, something that sets them up for failure. While anxiety exists in many forms in higher education, a particularly debilitating one is academic writing anxiety which makes students apprehensive of engaging in academic writing tasks. It is caused by low self-efficacy, extremely high fears of negative evaluation, stressful genres of writing like exams as well as socio-economic and cultural factors like race, gender, caste, linguistic background etc. It manifests in the form of several physiological, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms like increased heart rate, excessive confusion and task avoidance. To become future-ready, an important skill that young people need to develop is the ability to expertly manage their academic writing anxieties. Through our research, we wish to develop a technological intervention that helps college students do exactly this. Our long-term study will involve three phases: Phase 1: where we will design an intervention in the form of an online application that consists of anxiety reducing audio messages that will be integrated into Google Docs, a popular platform where college students write academic assignments; Phase 2: where we will implement this intervention to a sample of college students; Phase 3: where we will qualitatively and quantitatively assess the impact that the interventions in our application have on students and test our hypothesis that such interventions can reduce students’ academic writing anxiety and increase their ability to pay attention to their academic writing tasks. We have completed Phase 1 so far, whereby we have built an application called ComposeMe that consists of anxiety-reducing interventions that use principles of cognitive behavioral therapy and ambient music, in the form of customized audio support provided to students while they do academic writing on Google Docs. In this paper, we will describe the need for such an intervention, our process of building it, demonstrate what it does, and chart out our future plans for research using it.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
No
Citation / Publisher Attribution
ComposeMe: Designing Technology to Reduce Academic Writing Anxiety and Increase Attention in Higher Education, in A. Oancea (Ed.), Proceedings of the Yidan Prize Doctoral Conference, Department of Education, University of Oxford, p. 18-31
Scholar Commons Citation
Gupta, Anuj; Kalwani, Rakshak; and Shamsudhin, Nithin, "ComposeMe: Designing Technology to Reduce Academic Writing Anxiety and Increase Attention in Higher Education" (2021). English Faculty Publications. 294.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/eng_facpub/294
