How the Habits of Self-regulated Academic Writers are Behaviorally Facilitated?

Abstract

In this paper, the authors demonstrated online academic writing behaviors as an example to illustrate a habit loop in Interest-driven Creator (IDC) theory. A habit loop describes that the habitual routine of creation should be triggered by a cueing environment, and provide a sense of harmony. Furthermore, instead of using the theory as a design framework, the authors proposed that the IDC theory could also be used as an analysis framework. In this study, the authors aimed to explore how the habits of self-regulated academic writing were behaviorally facilitated. For this purpose, the authors collected behavioral data of graduate students in an online academic writing system for two months. The students were divided into high and low self-regulated learners. Their behavioral patterns were then computed separately with hidden Markov models. The results showed that the model of the high self-regulated learners included a small version of a creation loop and a habit loop, in which the academic writing were triggered by the behaviors of literature reading, self-monitoring, and co-authoring. Besides, after writing, the high self-regulated learners tended to go back to read more literature and monitor their progress. Conversely, in the model of the low self-regulated learners, all behaviors likely transited to writing without any evident loops, implying that the low self-regulated learners might be performance goal oriented.