Academics are increasingly engaged in writing genres with purposes and for readers outside of academia—a variety of science-based communication practices that fall under the term science communication. These practices often span different modes, genres, and even languages, requiring high degrees of rhetorical flexibility, strategic knowledge, and regulation of writing. In this study, we probe the self-regulation and specifically the metacognitive strategy knowledge (MSK) of seven senior scientists who regularly and actively engage with writing for science communication. We argue that understanding their MSK can illuminate how strategic knowledge is transferred across written genres, and importantly offer useful insights for the training of future scientists. Using data derived from in-depth, narrative interviews with a recall component, we identify a variety of strategies for task conceptualization/analysis, planning and goal setting, monitoring, and evaluating the writing of different genres. Task analysis appears particularly crucial in science communication writing, due to the great variety of purposes and readers that fall under this umbrella. Interestingly, our participants underscore storytelling strategies, and seem to transfer language and style monitoring strategies to and from science communication and publication. We map the strategies identified and discuss the implications of our study for further research and science communication pedagogy.

What aspects of writing are doctoral students metacognitive about when they write research articles for publication? Contributing to the recent conversation about metacognition in genre pedagogy, this study adopts a qualitative approach to illustrate what students have in common, across disciplines and levels of expertise, and the dynamic interplay of genre knowledge and metacognition in learning to write for research. 24 doctoral students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) were recruited from subsequent runs of a genre-based writing course and were interviewed within a 2-year period when they submitted an article for publication, 3 to 11 months after course completion. Over time and across disciplines, doctoral students’ metacognition converges on four main themes: genre analysis as a “tool” to read and write, audience and the readers’ mind, rhetorical strategies, and the writing process. Furthermore, these themes are extensively combined in the students’ thinking, confirming conceptualizations of expertise as an integration of knowledge types. Metacognition of these themes invoked increased perceived confidence and control over writing, suggesting key areas where metacognitive intervention may be promising.

Over the years, research on writing has increasingly emphasized the value of adopting a sociocultural perspective to understand how social context and social interaction relate to writing regulation. Using the theoretical lens of participatory appropriation, this study investigates the self-regulatory behavior of three successful Bachelor essay writers in literature, and how the interaction with their supervisors supported students’ development of writing regulation in disciplinary-relevant ways. Data was collected through in-depth qualitative interviews at three key moments in the term; Pintrich’s self-regulation framework was used as coding heuristic to trace participants’ self-regulation behavior over the term. Self-regulation data was cross-analyzed with data coded as participatory appropriation to identify the overlap between students’ self-regulation of writing and their social experiences, especially the dialogue with their supervisors. Our results show how the supervisors acted as agents of socialization, providing frames for adoption of disciplinary-relevant ways of thinking and doing, as well as indirectly sustaining the students’ motivation and re-conceptualization of the writing experience. Overall, this investigation responds to calls for inquiries of self-regulation against the backdrop of the social context in which it is embedded.

This article proposes a novel approach to the investigation of student academic writing. It applies theories of metacognition and self-regulated learning to understand how beginning academic writers develop the ability to participate in the communicative practices of academic written communication and develop rhetorical consciousness. The study investigates how this awareness changes over time and how it relates to students’ perceptions of the writing task, metacognitive awareness of strategic choices, and evaluation of their writing. Through a constructivist grounded theory approach, journals collected throughout a semester from students of beginning academic composition were analyzed to determine qualitative changes. The data suggest a link between task perception and students’ conditional metacognitive awareness —their understanding of how to adapt writing strategies to specific rhetorical requirements of the task and why—and performance evaluation. Metacognitive awareness also seems to have a reciprocal relationship with self-regulation and students’ development of individual writing approaches.