The Effects of Seven Types of Thinking on Perceived Difficulty in Academic Writing at the Prewriting Stage of Undergraduate EFL Students and the Use of NITF to Solve the Problems

บทคัดย่อ

The purposes of this study were 1) to investigate the effects of 7 types of thinking on Thai university undergraduates’ perceived difficulty in academic writing at the prewriting stage, 2) to find the rank orders of their effects, 3) to explore their relationships, 4) to construct a set of instructional innovations for the students to solve their problems and 5) to evaluate its effectiveness in various aspects. In 2 phases of the study, 350 and 47 undergraduate students were randomly selected from an indefinite and 57 populations to answer questionnaires, pretest, and posttest. Based on the findings from the first phase, 12 lessons of instructional materials named NITF were constructed for the students to use for 45 hours via Google Classroom to solve their problems in academic writing at the prewriting stage. The data were analyzed using SEM (Structural Equation Modeling), Paired-Sample t-tests, One-Sample t-tests, and Simple Correlation. It was found that 1) 4 out of 7 types of thinking had significant effects on students’ perceived difficulty in academic writing at p = 0.05, 2) the rank orders of the 4 types of thinking were critical, abstract, creative, and convergent thinking, and 3) the relationships between the 7 types of thinking were very high and significant at p = 0.05. Besides, 4) the content validity of NITF was 0.875, indicating a substantial level, and 5) its effect size was very large (d = 1.625), and, on average, the students were extremely satisfied with the instructional innovation.