I’ve been caught up reading the research related to students and writing motivation.  I’d though I’d share some of what I’ve read in Gray A. Troia and Rebecca K. Shankland’s research article “Motivation Research in Writing: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations”.    They basically review the research that has been done on motivation when it comes to writing.   Self-efficacy beliefs (perceived competence), mastery and performance goal orientations, task interest and value, and attribution for success and failure are all summarized in this article.  

What they found is that motivated students usually know how to employ coping and learning strategies.  A student who knows how to cope, learns from his/her mistakes and works around those mistakes in order to achieve the desired goal.  They know how to encourage themselves and to seek assistance when needed without the fear of being perceived as incompetent.  

Obviously, on the other hand, students who lack motivation usually don’t use these kinds of strategies.  These students have low self-efficacy and will often to resort to several non-productive behaviors such as avoiding any assistance as requesting help will reveal his/her incompetence.  Low self-efficacy may even result in “learned helplessness” as well as negative emotional states such as anxiety and depression.  I’ve seen these traits a number of time in un-motivated writers as the Success Center.  

However students who possess high self-efficacy (overconfidence) can fall in a habit of disregarding those strategies.   I guess you can sort of connect this to the one-drafters but that doesn’t mean they’re not motivated to write.  They just have a different way of approaching the writing task.  Research has also suggested that writing skills largely play a big role in influencing how well a student accomplishes a task which of course contributes to a student’s writing motivation.  

The researchers suggest that 

1)students have opportunities to perform challenging tasks which they can be successful through sufficient scaffolding.  

2)Coping tactics should be modeled while faced with difficulty in completing a task. 

3)Feedback is (realistic, specific, and truthful) is very important

4)belief that competence is alterable through the expenditure of effort must be fostered

5)continued need for significant effort may signal low levels of ability and may negatively affect self-efficacy must always be recognized  

There are loads more of information about what research is being done what type of research should be done in the domain of writing motivation.  The rest is for my prospectus.