A collaborative article of Patricia McCarthy, Scott Meier and Regina Rinderer, this article explores the idea of self-efficacy, or rather a student's perception of their own self-efficacy, in relation to writing competency at the college level.They explain that students who estimate their writing abilities and effectiveness to be quite high perform accordingly, and that this holds also for students who estimate their abilities to be quite low (the Pygmalion Effect in action). While this comes as a surprise to few, these authors further explain that of a few key factors, namely perceived self-efficacy, anxiety, locus of control, and cognitive processing methods, while all affect the quality of writing produced by students, self-efficacy proved to be the strongest predictor of student performance regardless of the other conditions in their studies. Students who become used to a process of accurate and frequent self-evaluation, both of the final product AND of their abilities separate from the product, may develop a more accurate and more proactive view of their writing competence and their later work may reflect this.

This is an interesting review/exploration by Jill Parrot of Eastern Kentucky University of David Foster's book "Writing with Authority". Parrot explains that Foster's book compares and contrasts the German university writing systems with American ones to examine the effects of each on a college student's confidence and self-efficacy in writing. Foster's thesis begins, "Undergraduates should learn how to write as knowledge-makers, developing the capacities for self-direction, long-term goal setting, and cumulative, recursive task development and writing," thus setting up the focus of the study. He argues that while there are pros and cons to each country's academic practices, the German system's focus on gradual development and self-direction with frequent interaction and discussion in the early stages helps to create a more long-term oriented view of the writing process and to establish the students as authorities on a topic that they may spend a great deal of time with. Without having access to the book itself, this article serves as a very thorough analysis of the text and I found this to be very informative.

This article by Laurie Grobman (also author of one of this week's article assignments from the course packet) describes the ways in which undergraduate participation in research and research publication contributes to increased authority and sense of authorship in undergraduate students. This authorship puts the students in discourse with their education and beyond, creating a purpose and identification with their course of study rather than making them passive receivers of it. This benefits their confidence and command of composition as well as putting them in the "driver seat", so to speak, of their participation in academia, and levels the playing field of student and "real" writing, erasing old and disadvantaging dichotomies.

This article by Donald Reitzes and Peter Burke reflects a sociological study into college students' perceptions of their college role in relation to their self-concept and identity. It is suggested that for these students their role performance is heavily affected by how well this role is integrated into their identity as a college student, and that students that have a greater sense of identification with their college student status will perform this student role and its accompanying responsibilities better than those who deviate from the student role identity - that is, those who identify more strongly with counter-roles. While this doesn't directly address composition proficiency and mastery, the basic theoretical approach would seem to follow that those students who are encouraged to incorproate their role as writers into their student and general identities would perform this role better and with more zeal than those who feel that this role is a performance unrelated to their fundamental identity.

In this article by Ken Hyland, he examines how the role of the writer and "writer intrusion" affect the impression given by a body of writing, and particularly how terms like "writer intrusion" reflect an unnecessarily negative view on the personal involvement of the writer with the subject. While he acknowledges that different contexts require different levels of formality and passive voice, new writers benefit from learning how their role shapes the meaning of their work, and how to take a particular identity as the author. He focuses here specifically on the use of the first person in academic writing and what options are available for its use across many fields; however, this is only the tip of the iceberg, he says, in the formation of an authorial identity in an academic setting.