Academic writing is a clear, concise and formal style of writing. Its purpose is to prove a claim in the light of evidence so the reader can agree with your point of view. For achieving excellence in any academic writing task, such as dissertation or research paper drafting, you can use a number of approaches, such as goal analysis. Goal analysis is the most sought-after technique that educationalists use to achieve goals related to students’ capabilities, courses and instructions. The core purpose of goal analysis in education is to define educational goals and identify steps to achieve them.
This article aims to suggest that academic writers can implement the goal analysis rules to handle lengthy writing tasks, such as dissertations and research writing. Let’s first discuss what goal analysis is and how educationalists use it to improve educational outcomes. Later, we will apply the process to academic writing.
What is goal analysis?
According to Mager and Robert, goal analysis is a process important to describe the meaning of goals that someone wants to achieve. In another context, goal analysis is an examination of steps that an expert takes to achieve a goal. Basically, goal analysis is a technique to analyse goals to examine decisions and operations that are important to achieve them. To perform this analysis, two main steps are to create a goal statement and identify the steps. Furthermore, the sub-steps include:
- Classifying the goals
- Identifying the vague goals
- Creating a road map to achieve the goals
- Creating a diagram containing all information about steps and sub-steps
- Drawing a conclusion if required
If you are unable to follow these points due to any issue, you can hire the best dissertation writing services.
What is goal analysis in education?
Goal analysis in education is more or less similar to the traditional type of goal analysis. The only difference lies in the nature of the goals. For example, in the institutional type of goal analysis, they may include increasing the sales, generating more revenue or any other business success-related factor. However, as far as goal analysis in education is concerned, such goals describe any factor to improve the impact or outcome of an educational strategy. Theoretically, educational goals are the process of identifying objectives, short-term attainable goals, and plans for attaining these goals. Mostly, educational objectives include:
- Making statements that describe skills
- Finding ways to improve the critical thinking abilities of students
- Making plans to make students psychologically, cognitively and emotionally strong
- Suggesting strategies to improve creative and innovative thinking skills
- Making planners to know what students have learnt from the course, unit, lesson and project.
Apart from all exploring human capabilities, making courses and defining instructions are also important educational goals that can be achieved by using goal analysis. Human capability in education is a talent or ability of a student that we can develop and use for achieving certain goals. Courses are the training and curriculum that students receive, while instructions are structural sets of events that have a great impact on students’ learning behaviour. To achieve the goals and identify steps, the goal analysis in education follows the same above-mentioned five steps.
What are students’ goals to achieve in academic writing?
Academic writing is the most difficult style of writing. There are many factors that one should consider for adopting a good academic writing style. For example, if you are writing a dissertation, deep insights into the problem of interest, selection of variables of interest, formation of research questions, and selection of appropriate methods for data analysis and interpretation are important tasks. To complete each section of a dissertation, you need to develop an array of skills. Thus, the development of skills that a student may need in different stages of academic writing is the most common goal to achieve in academic writing.
How can goal analysis help students to achieve academic writing goals?
Goal analysis in education can surely help students to achieve their academic writing goals. The following section can help you how this concept works.
Suppose you are striving to improve critical writing skills (an essential academic writing skill) for drafting any research paper or dissertation, then goal analysis in education can be applied. The first step must be to declare ‘critical writing skills development’ a goal to achieve. Selection of multiple goals such as polishing analytical skills, decision-making skills and problem-solving skills can also be considered in this process. After that, research and write steps that you would follow to improve the skill (s). For example, you can write about how many hours you would like to spend on understanding the basics of critical evaluation.
You can also take into account the human capabilities, courses and instructions while defining steps to achieve the academic writing goal (s). In the next step, you can make a diagram containing all information about steps and sub-steps for goal accomplishment. End the process by setting a deadline and start working. This is one way in which goal analysis helps researchers in improving academic writing through skill development. Let us see another case.
Dissertations and research papers aim to prove a claim or solve a scientific problem. It always starts with some well-defined research goals. Goal analysis in education can help the researcher to measure the feasibility of his/her research project. If goal analysis proves a research’s goals attainable, it increases the researcher’s confidence in the research. It is also important as it suggests ways to shortly complete a science research project by defining steps and subsets to achieve goals.
Conclusion:
This discussion highlights the fact that academic writing is a technical task. If someone really wants to improve his/her academic writing skills, he/she must keep doing experiments. The experiment helps us try new things and learn from experience. Likewise, goal analysis in education has been improving the educational standard for many years. Thus, it is recommended to apply the goal analysis to improve academic writing skills as well. By using goal analysis, you can improve your writing skills and measure the feasibility or attainability of research goals. In clear words, goal analysis in education is very important in academic writing.
