If you are coming to this blog first, this is part II of a three part series describing the story behind my research for this study:
Dissemination and All that FUN Stuff
Tom did the stats and, dammit, we ended up with a p = .051 significance for change in self-efficacy from pre to post course. Every researcher’s worst nightmare. You’ll note I do what most researchers do with p = .051, I call it non significant in the abstract but proceed to talk about it like it is significant. Take that as you wish.
I went to a conference in February 2013 and presented just a basic version of my findings. I focused the presentation on the course design because I knew that was what my audience would be most interested in. I was swamped after the presentation ended. Writing is a huge problem in nursing programs. Everyone is frustrated. After that conference, we almost “sold” (I wouldn’t have made a cent) the scholarly writing course to be used by another institution but they deemed it then too expensive for the size of their student group. It had taken me 7 years to perfect the design of that course which began when I taught it not-for-credit prior to implementing it as a credit course. A detailed description of the course can be found in the appendix of the publication I am discussing and is linked above. The party that had looked into buying it thought why re-invent the wheel? However, the decision makers at their institution said no.
Related, but incidental, the process the finance people use to calculate how much a course design is worth unto itself is pretty fascinating. They need to pay me more. My intellectual property is worth a lot of money to them.
I finished data collection in February 2012, but it took me till fall of 2012 before I did anything with the data. I presented at that February 2013 conference in Edmonton and then in the spring of 2013 for our faculty, and then I sat on it. I started another study in the fall of 2013 to replicate and improve upon what I had done in this study. So I started to read what had been published about undergrad writing in nursing because it was really time I did a more thorough job of reading. It was a sad state of affairs the writing research in nursing, and very limited or anecdotal. For the most part, what I was reading taught me that I had an instinctive knack for figuring out what kinds of questions researchers and educators had about student writing. Next thing I knew it was 2014 and I needed to do more than present, I needed to write the study up and see if someone would publish it.
And I was terrified. Yes me. Terrified of writing. The last thing I had published was the main study for my Master’s thesis. That one seemed to take a long time to go from thesis to draft. It went through (as I recall) 3 peer reviewed processes at the first journal of submission — 2 revise and resubmit requests and then a final smaller revision. This was in what I now call the “olden days” of publishing when you had to mail hard copies of your blinded paper to be reviewed and they snail mailed your reviews back to you. I had graduated with my Masters in 2002. I sent the paper out for publication in 2003. I had a kid in there somewhere because I remember being on mat leave, coming in for my baby shower, and picking up an envelope with my reviews in it. I don’t know when I finally dealt with them. I think it took me a long time because the paper didn’t reach publication until January/February of 2006. In fairness, it went to a good journal so I was pleased. But that was my last academic publication before the one I write about now. By the time I got that article published, I had written a novel. My marriage was on its way to falling apart. My marriage did fall apart. I wrote a second (shitty) novel. I was about to have a midlife crisis and spend about six years just riding my bike ridiculous distances. I didn’t want to write academically. The next thing I knew I woke up and it was 2011. I had done a stint on anti-anxiety meds, calmed the F down, and realized life didn’t need to be lived with so much agitation and competition and I should be enjoying its beauty not tackling it with a vengence. Ironically enough, I came back to my academic sensibilities through that epiphany. Yes, going back to academia actually mellowed me. I had changed my name back to my maiden name. I decided to conduct a research study and it took me 3 years to get my ass in gear and write it up.
Getting my Undergraduate Students Involved
What’s the quickest way to get a lit review done? Assign your undergraduates to do it for you for credit. This is where authors three and four, Torrie and Holly got involved. I had this idea. My students wrote this paper in my research course where they had to find 5 primary studies on a topic. Not the same paper I use now but its predecessor. I knew enough at this point to know that there were barely 5 articles on my topic but there were some. I threw out an offer to the class in the fall of 2014. If anyone would explore writing research and writing self-efficacy, I would use their work to structure my review of the literature and I would give them authorship on the published work. Three students stepped forward with interest. One eventually dropped out. I helped them hone their topic. Torrie looked at the studies which had developed interventions to improve writing. Holly wrote about self-efficacy and anxiety. The additional articles that Torrie and Holly found began pushing my reading into the social science literature which is where my ideas on writing instruction and research really began to develop.
Fast forward into the future and when I was finally prepping the first version of the manuscript for publication in spring of 2015, the journal we first sent to required more than just manuscript involvement for publication credit so Torrie and Holly, the troupers that they are, agreed to explore the qualitative data I had for this study. I asked them to read through that data with a lens toward statements made that supported the quantitative findings. They did a wonderful job and identified some similar points to each other and learned the value of parallel data assessment and trustworthiness of qualitative analysis and I could now tick off “contributed to analysis” beside their names for project involvement. The findings of their analysis are mentioned briefly in the paper in the discussion section at the bottom of the first paragraph on p. 12.
I think of everything I did within this project, getting Torrie and Holly involved in this work is the part I am most proud of. These were two bright students (now nurses) who sacrificed researching something more glamorous and clinically based (the stuff students value) to gain a really important academic credential that they can talk about and use on their CVs for years. I was happy to give them this opportunity.
The final stage of this process was the publication experience which can be found in Part III
academicswrite 
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