The Future of Education

Many researchers have argued that customized learning opportunities should be provided considering individual differences in the educational environment. The most effective way to consider students' individual differences is to find and classify specific patterns among them (Alexander & Murphy, 1999). In particular, considering that writing research ultimately provides basic information for effective writing instruction, it is required to derive learners' writing profiles and find suitable teaching methods according to those different types (Kim, 2020). For this purpose, the current study aims to analyze the trends in writing profiling research conducted in the domain of language learning. We adopted a systematic review as research methodology to examine research trends strictly and efficiently and analyzed writing profiling research in terms of its theme, method, purpose, etc. The research procedure based on systematic review was carried out according to the flow chart and the criteria for selecting and excluding literatures, suggested by the PRISMA group (Moher et al., 2009). First, a total of 1,026 research articles were collected from two representative research databases in the field and additional searches through reference review. Subsequently, we went through a step-by-step selection stage of deduplication, primary filtering, and secondary filtering under the selection and exclusion criteria. We then decided a final list of research articles that could be properly classified as writing profiling research through abstract review. The content analysis technique was applied to the selected research articles. They were coded based on following 7 criteria: research methodology, participant, theme of research, research area, targeted/categorical variable, purpose of analysis, and whether there is a difference in quality/level between the options of each categorical variable. From these coding results, we could investigate the overall trends of writing profiling research and find the implications for the design of follow-up studies and the application of writing education.

Keywords Language Learning, Writing, Profiling, Research Trends

References
[1] Alexander, P. A., & Murphy, P. K. (1999). Learner profiles: Valuing individual differences within classroom communities. In P. L. Ackerman, P. C. Kyllonen, & R. D. Roberts (Eds.), Learning and individual differences: Process, trait, and content determinants (pp. 413-436). Washington, DC: APA.
[2] Kim, H. (2020). Profiles of undergraduate student writers: Differences in writing strategy and impacts on text quality. Learning and Individual Differences, 78, 101823.
[3] Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., Altman, D. G., & The PRISMA Group (2009). Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: The PRISMA Statement. PLoS Med, 6(6), e1000097.