Faculty and student representations of academic writing at Spanish universities

Research on academic writing has been the focus of several international publications, seminars and conferences during the last decades. However, knowledge of the practices and conceptions, along with the status of writing in higher education, is quite disparate depending on the contexts and traditions. In this paper, we survey the research on representations of academic writing internationally as well as the background of the European Writing Survey (EUWRIT), which has two versions, one targeted at students and the other at faculty, both of which were used in our research project. This paper explains the rationale of the scales and describes the items and the international underpinnings which endorse their development. Then, the characteristics of the sample, which were shared by all the studies included in this special issue, are outlined. Participants were 1,044 students and 280 faculty in different disciplines at nine Spanish universities. The theoretical structure and reliability of each of the scales are analysed. The paper ends with the descriptive general results regarding faculty and students and the differences observed based on some characteristics of participants from different disciplines. ResumenEl estudio de la escritura academica ha sido el centro de interes de publicaciones seminarios y conferencias de alcance internacional. Sin embargo, el conocimiento de las practicas y concepciones y del estatus que la escritura tiene en la Educacion Superior es muy diferente segun los contextos y las tradiciones. En este articulo se revisan los trabajos sobre las representaciones de la escritura academica en el contexto internacional y se presentan los cuestionarios Encuesta Europea sobre la Escritura Academica (EEEA) para profesores y estudiantes, utilizados en el presente proyecto de investigacion. Tambien se describen las caracteristicas de la muestra a partir de la cual se han realizado los analisis que conforman los articulos del monografico (1,044 estudiantes y 280 profesores de nueve universidades espanolas y se analiza la estructura teorica y la fiabilidad de las escalas. Se analizan los resultados descriptivos generales relativos a profesores y estudiantes y las diferencias observadas en funcion de algunas caracteristicas de la muestra en las diferentes disciplinas.