Guidelines do matter. The effect of the use of writing guidelines in the quality of argumentative writing at the university

Abstract

This paper reports a study aimed at evaluating the effect of two different writing guidelines on the quality of argumentative essays of psychology students. The study consisted of a secondary analysis of a database which included the grades of 543 students (355 women) that took the undergraduate course Educational Psychology between the years 2012 and 2018. Two groups were compared: group 1, corresponding to students that took the course until 2015, and group 2, corresponding to students that did it since 2016 onwards. Analyses of covariance show statistically significant differences between the two groups. The group who used the more elaborated and explicit guideline (group 2) outperformed the one who used the less elaborated guideline. The results show that guidelines are effective tools for promoting argumentative writing in educational psychology learning.