Introduction

In recent years, source-based writing tasks have been increasingly used in many academic contexts due to their potential for enhancing knowledge transformation skills and the positive effects on writing quality (Gholami and Alinasab, 2017; Plakans, 2008; Plakans and Gebril, 2012; Leijten et al., 2014; Weigle and Parker, 2012). It is rare to find an academic writing task that does not require students to extract relevant information from one or multiple texts and then incorporate this information into a new text. Despite its benefits, source-based writing is considered a highly demanding task because it involves a combination of reading and writing processes such as understanding the source text(s), selecting key ideas, organizing the ideas, and paraphrasing those ideas using own words.

According to Spivey and King (1989), writing from sources involves three interrelated processes: selecting, organizing, and connecting. Selecting refers to identifying the most relevant pieces of information from the text. Organizing involves rearranging the information in their text by referring to the structure of the ideas in the source text. Connecting is the key process in source-based writing which encompasses the integration of the information contained in the original text with prior knowledge. Spivey and King (1989) posit that the three processes do not occur in a simple linear way by first reading and then writing. Rather, writers need to alternate both reader and writer roles.

The increased attention to source-based writing led to a proliferation of studies on the differences in performance between learners (Cumming et al., 2016). Previous studies highlighted the impact of several task-related variables on students’ performance, including the prompt (Shi et al., 2020), topic familiarity (Bråten et al., 2018), the type of information (complementary vs. contradictory) (Strømsø and Bråten, 2014), the cognitive demands (Yamada, 2002), and the genre of writing (narrative vs. argumentative) (Vandermeulen et al., 2020). The effect of the number of sources, which is an important aspect of writing task design is still in its infancy. Very few researchers have attempted to study the variability in students’ source-based writing performance by asking students to write from single or multiple sources (e.g., Golparvar and Rashidi, 2021). This emerging research provided valuable insights into the quality of students’ products. It has been shown that writing from multiple sources may result in more syntactic and lexical complexity because learners are prompted by the increased cognitive demands. Nevertheless, this research is limited in two ways. First, it remained confined to investigating surface linguistic features. By focusing on surface linguistic features, researchers did not capture the broader aspects of writing performance, namely selecting, integrating, and organizing information that can be used to distinguish good from poorly written source-based essays. Therefore, we need to know more about how different task types affect aspects that focus on both reading and writing processes which can be used to evaluate students’ source-based writing performance. Second, comparative studies did not tap into how students perceive their confidence levels when writing from a single source as compared to multiple sources. This distinction is important because effective performance of cognitively complex tasks requires belief in one’s capabilities known as self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997). Thus far, researchers demonstrated that self-efficacy is a significant predictor of source-based writing performance (e.g., Golparvar and Kafi, 2021). However, the moderating effect of the number of sources has remained unclear.

Therefore, this study investigates the effects of two different types of source-based writing tasks on student performance and self-efficacy beliefs. Specifically, we compare the performance and self-efficacy beliefs of 1st-year university students who were given multiple sources to those who were given only one source. To ensure a fair comparison, we identified common activities in both single-source and multiple-source tasks and ensured the features of the tasks were sufficiently generic to apply to both. In particular, we focused on selecting key ideas, integrating ideas through paraphrasing and summarizing, organizing ideas into a coherent text, and using language correctly to convey those ideas.

This research contributes to the existing literature on source-based writing in two ways. First, the research bridges a gap in the literature by comparing the performance and self-efficacy beliefs of students who write from a single source to those who write from multiple sources. The study’s novelty lies in its focus on the broader aspects of writing performance, such as selecting, integrating, and organizing information. By better understanding the effect of the number of sources on writing performance, educators can more effectively create interventions to enhance writing. Second, the study will shed light on whether writing from multiple sources leads to a decrease or increase in self-efficacy levels. A clear understanding of the effect of the number of sources on self-efficacy beliefs would provide useful information on how to scaffold instruction to support students’ writing. For example, if it is found that using multiple sources leads to a decrease in self-efficacy levels, educators can provide additional support to help students manage the complexity of writing from multiple sources effectively.

Review of the literature

This brief overview of the literature is divided into three parts. The first part provides the theoretical background. The second part summarizes research supporting the provision of single and multiple-source texts to help students improve their writing performance. The third part presents research related to examining the relationship between self-efficacy and writing performance which will therefore provide evidence for the need to conduct further research on this topic.

Theoretical background

The knowledge-telling-knowledge transforming model and the self-efficacy theory are useful frameworks for the analysis of the effect of the number of sources on students’ writing performance and self-efficacy beliefs.

The knowledge-telling and knowledge-transforming model is a framework that describes the development of writing. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1987) made a distinction between two processes that can lead to the development of writing skills: Knowledge telling which involves the shallow retrieval of information from memory and knowledge transforming which involves problem-solving and deeper engagement with the task at hand. In the context of source-based writing, the model suggests that understanding the source material and presenting appropriate content reflect the knowledge-telling process whereas the integration of source materials into a new text represents the knowledge-transforming process. According to the model, the number of sources may influence the processes of knowledge telling and knowledge transforming. Specifically, when writing with a single source, the focus may be on knowledge telling, which involves retrieving and presenting information from memory. However, when writing with multiple sources, the focus may shift towards knowledge transformation, which involves problem-solving and deeper engagement with the task, as the writer has to integrate and synthesize information from different sources. Therefore, the number of sources used in writing can influence the cognitive processes involved in writing and the level of complexity of the resulting text.

Self-efficacy theory is also crucial to understanding the extent to which the number of sources affects students’ writing performance. Self-efficacy is defined as an individual’s beliefs about his or her ability to perform a particular task (Bandura, 1977). The theory was developed to explain how students’ confidence is built up and how it can be enhanced. According to Bandura (1997), feelings of self-efficacy may stem from four sources: (1) mastery experience resulting from their interpretations of their efforts as they engage in tasks, (2) vicarious experiences involving the observation of others perform tasks, (3) feedback from credible sources, and (4) physiological responses to a task. Mastery experience is believed to be the most influential source of self-efficacy which means that completing a more complex task successfully persuades learners that they are competent and thus they can approach future tasks with high self-efficacy. Therefore, self-efficacy is likely to increase if the writing activities are challenging and direct learners toward mastery.

Number of sources and writing performance

Exploring the factors affecting source-based writing performance has been an important objective of several previous studies (Anmarkrud et al., 2014; Bråten et al., 2018; Vandermeulen et al., 2020). However, findings on the impact of writing from a single source as compared to multiple sources have been scarce. Some empirical studies have reported that writing from multiple sources improves the understanding of subject matter because learners are provided with the opportunity to make more transformations. For instance, Wiley and Voss (1999) conducted an experiment with sixty-four university students. One group was provided with eight separate source documents from websites dealing with the history of Ireland between 1800 and 1850. A second group received the same information as a single chapter from a book. Students in both groups had to read the source information and then compose history essays. The essays were assessed on the extent of inferences and integrations made. Results demonstrated that providing students with information from multiple sources instead of a single textbook chapter resulted in more transformation of information from the sources than when students were presented with a single text. Furthermore, the authors noted better performance on inference and analogy tasks which led to a better understanding of the multiple sources. The study did find a positive impact on the use of connectors in essays which could be used to measure writing performance. Yet, the study did not directly tap into writing performance.

Britt and Aglinskas (2002) also compared performance in single-source and multiple-source conditions focusing on the skills of sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization. They found that essays in the Sourcer’s Apprentice/Multiple Documents condition included more integration and were rated higher by the history teachers, meaning that presenting students with multiple texts had a larger impact on the connectedness of their writing. However, as for Wiley and Voss (1999), the main focus of this study was on the comprehension of multiple documents.

Similar results were obtained in Stadtler et al.’s (2013) study which investigated whether the presentation of information affects the integration of information on controversial issues. Learners were provided with information in either four separate websites by four authors including conflicting views, or in a single website by one author. Students in the multiple source condition accurately selected and incorporated more conflicting points in their essays than students in the single source condition. Similarly, the variables assessed were mainly related to comprehension, and only integration was measured. Wider perspectives and assessment of other writing aspects are needed.

A more recent study conducted by Golparvar and Rashidi (2021) examined the impact of the number of sources on a variety of measures of writing performance. The authors drew on the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2011) which posits that task variables including reasoning demand and number of elements could contribute to an improvement in linguistic complexity and accuracy through the effect of attentional resources. The authors compared 65 writing samples of students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) on two tasks (a simple task vs. a complex task). In the simple task, the students were asked to summarize a single text, whereas the participants in the complex task were required to write a summary for a three-passage task dealing with the same issue. They assessed the lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, cohesion, and grammatical accuracy of the summaries. Results indicated that students in the multiple-text condition improved their syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and causal cohesion but had a decline in accuracy. There were no significant differences between the two conditions on lexical sophistication. As such, the findings seemed to suggest that writing from multiple sources could be better than writing from a single source in improving students’ linguistic complexity. Nevertheless, Golparvar and Rashidi’s (2021) study did not report on the differences between the performance of students, particularly concerning major rhetorical, source-based writing features such as content development, organization, and selection of relevant ideas, since the papers were not rated. Therefore, there is limited empirical evidence on the impact of the number of sources on students’ writing performance in terms of selection of relevant information, source use, organization, and language use. Further research is required to understand the impact of the number of sources on the rhetorical features of students’ writing.

Writing from sources and self-efficacy

There is sufficient empirical evidence indicating that self-efficacy is associated with improved independent writing performance (Multon et al., 1991; Pajares, 2003; Pajares and Johnson, 1996; Prat-Sala and Redford, 2012). Low self-efficacy was found to be detrimental as it resulted in motivational problems. However, the relationship between self-efficacy and source-based writing performance has been investigated only recently (Golparvar and Khafi, 2021; Wilby, 2020; Zhou et al., 2022). For example, Golparvar and Khafi (2021) investigated the contribution of writing strategy use as well as three elements of self-efficacy (linguistic, self-regulatory, and performance self-efficacy) to the writing performance of source-based university students. Results from correlational analyses demonstrated that the three elements of writing self-efficacy correlated positively with source-based writing performance. Results also showed that the three components of self-efficacy had different predictive powers. While linguistic self-efficacy contributed to discourse synthesis and strategies of source use, self-regulatory and performance efficacy contributed more to metacognitive strategies of planning and evaluation. Thus, the results provided further support for the relationship between self-efficacy and academic writing performance. Nevertheless, existing studies focused on investigating the relationship between writing and self-efficacy rather than the factors affecting self-efficacy. Although different source-based tasks have been used to prompt students, it remains unclear whether variability in the task characteristics affects students’ self-efficacy. Researchers need to identify the extent to which task characteristics such as the number of sources affect students’ self-efficacy beliefs to provide a basis for pedagogic decisions about designing and evaluating such tasks.

Bearing in mind the gaps in the literature, this study aimed to examine the differences in the writing performance of students who were given a single source in comparison to their peers who were provided with multiple sources and the effect on their self-efficacy beliefs. Understanding how the writing of students differs across single-source and multiple-source tasks is vital to justify their value. To tackle this issue, the present study intends to address the following questions:

  1. 1.

    What is the impact of writing from multiple sources compared to writing from a single source on students’ writing performance?

  2. 2.

    Is writing from multiple sources more effective than writing from a single source in improving students’ self-efficacy in writing?

Method

To investigate the students’ writing performance and self-efficacy beliefs in two different source-based tasks, we adopted a between-subject design. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: multiple-source group and single-source group. The multiple-source group (n = 28) was given four sources on the topic of distracted driving. They were required to read and understand the information contained in the four sources and then write an opinion essay on whether the distracted driving law in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) should be changed combining evidence from the four sources. The single-source group (n = 29) received one source on the same topic accompanied by the same instructions. The two writing tasks were not implemented as treatments or interventions aimed at enhancing the participants’ performance. Rather, they were used as stimuli to prompt change in both writing performance and self-efficacy beliefs. Participants in both groups were surveyed on their self-efficacy beliefs before the start and after completion of the task to further determine the effect of each task on their writing confidence.

Participants

The participants of this study were year 1 college students enrolled in a General English course designed to improve their reading and writing skills. The course gave students practice in writing conventions, responding to readings, and incorporating sources into their essays. The study involved 57 students who were grouped into two sections. One section had 29 students, while the other had 28. To ensure validity, the sections were randomly assigned to either the multiple-source condition or the single-source condition. Specifically, the group of 28 students was randomly assigned to the multiple-source condition, while the group of 29 students was randomly assigned to the single-source condition. The two groups did not differ in terms of age, gender, first language, and writing ability. In total 57 participants were males and only two were females. Their English proficiency ranged from 5.5 to 6.0 on the IELTS test which means that they had a homogeneous level in English. To further ascertain their English proficiency, the two groups were administered the LexTALE, which is a brief lexical decision test that can be used to measure the English proficiency of non-native speakers (Lemhöfer and Broersma, 2012). There were no significant differences between the two groups in their scores on the LexTALE (t(55) = 6.676, p = 0.502). We also assessed the two groups’ writing abilities by administering a pre-writing test. The pre-writing test consisted of writing a 250-word IELST-type opinion essay on the topic of banning plastic bags. Students were given 40 minutes to write and revise their responses. The essays were scored holistically and the results found that the two groups were not significantly different in their overall independent writing performance (t(55) = 1.722, p = 0.091). The impact of the number of sources would be strongest when both groups were comparable in writing from sources. Therefore, an additional integrated writing task was collected as a baseline measurement of their ability to write from sources. The task consisted of summarizing a short passage on the topic of banning plastic bags. Analysis revealed that there was no significant difference between the pre-test scores of the two groups in terms of overall performance (t(55) = 1.865, p = 0.068).

Reading materials

Two tasks were designed to assess the effect of the number of sources on students’ writing performance and self-efficacy beliefs: The single-source task and the multiple-source task. Five sources were selected and included in each task. The single-source task included a single text. The multiple-source task included a newspaper article, an FAQ from a website, a graph, and an excerpt from Ted Talk viewers’ comments. Both external and internal factors were kept in mind during the selection of sources. The external factors included topic familiarity and complexity. The internal factors were students’ proficiency, background knowledge, and interest. The topic of the five sources was distracted driving and was chosen because it was relevant to their field of study and contained substantive content for the student to engage within their writing. All students had already completed a unit about distracted driving using the same materials and instructional strategies. To ensure conformity, and avoid making one group more advantageous in terms of the amount of information, there was a considerable overlap of information in both tasks. The sources provided contained information about distracted driving and related laws and regulations in the UAE. Source 1 included frequently asked questions about distracted driving, its dangers, and why people engage in it. Source 2 consisted of a newspaper article from Gulf News that discussed the warning issued by Abu Dhabi Police regarding the dangers of distracted driving and the penalties for breaking the law. Source 3 included comments from a TED talk regarding the ban on cellphone use while driving. Source 4 included a graph that showed the results of a research initiative conducted in December 2021 to determine the root cause of reckless driving. Source 5 included a newspaper article that contained all the information from sources 1, 2, 3, and 4. Length was also taken into account to ensure that students spend the same amount of reading time. We made sure that the single-source task and the multiple-source-task included 705 words each. Flesch–Kincaid readability levels for the two tasks ranged between 9 and 11 which could be easily understood by the participants in the study. Furthermore, experts were asked to rate the difficulty levels of the single-source and multiple-source tasks on a scale from 1 to 5 to ensure that the tasks had similar difficulty. Therefore, the sole difference lay in the number of sources that we expected would elicit different writing products.

The scoring rubric

To measure the extent to which students in the single-source group outperformed students in the multiple-sources group or vice versa, we developed a writing-from-sources rubric. The purpose of the scoring rubric was to guide the raters and make the standards of performance clear. It consisted of four criteria: content, source use, organization, and language use. The same criteria were previously selected by Plakans and Gebril (2013) to analyze students’ performance in integrated writing tasks. In addition, the criteria were chosen because they were generic enough to allow for a comparison between two different source-based tasks. These criteria were scored as Very Good (4), Good (3), Moderate (2), Poor (1). These levels of accomplishments are commonly used in writing research to assess writing performance (Li and Wang, 2021; Uludag and McDonough, 2022). The rubric was revised by two expert researchers who applied it to a total of ten student papers from the same course in a previous semester. This revision ensured consistency between raters in measuring students’ performance in writing from sources and resulted in the final rubric version in Appendix A.

Self-efficacy survey

The self-efficacy survey was designed to evaluate writers’ self-efficacy beliefs before and after completing the source-based writing task (Appendix B). In the beginning, 22 items were borrowed and adapted from previous studies investigating L2 writing self-efficacy (Bruning et al., 2013; Teng et al., 2018; Zhou et al., 2022). The statements were chosen because they were already validated and directly related to source-based writing. Additionally, they were consistent with the four writing aspects assessed in the current study as outlined in the scoring rubric. The survey required the students to indicate their agreement with each of the 22 statements using a 5-point (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree) Likert-type scale. The survey was first piloted on 8 students who were not involved in the study and then reviewed by a panel of expert researchers. Students’ and reviewers’ comments were used to improve the statements’ readability and avoid any misunderstanding that may arise.

To simplify the analysis, we performed a PCA on the survey responses from both groups. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy was 0.67 and Barlett’s Test of Sphericity was significant (p < 0.05), suggesting that the data were appropriate for PCA. The analysis yielded different subscales, each addressing a particular aspect of students’ source-based writing. The three subscales used in our analysis, the related 18 statements, and factor loadings after applying orthogonal varimax rotations are in Table 1.

Table 1 Factor analysis of the student self-efficacy survey.
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The first subscale, labeled “writing-related abilities,” included five competencies relevant to academic writing in general: the ability to write a well-developed essay, the ability to write a well-organized essay, the ability to use phrases to link ideas together, the ability to write grammatically correct sentences, and ability to use appropriate vocabulary. Four competencies were relevant to academic reading and were included in the second subscale which was labeled “reading-related-abilities”: the ability to select relevant ideas from the text(s), the ability to justify opinion with ideas from the text(s), the ability to summarize the main points in the text(s), the ability to think about the relationships between the text(s). The third subscale was labeled source integration and included competencies relevant to source use: ability to paraphrase sentences from the text(s), ability to quote reading materials properly, ability to reference reading materials using correct APA format, ability to avoid plagiarism, ability to integrate the content of the readings into their writing.

Procedure

Before the study began, we obtained the Research Ethics Committee’s approval. The study was conducted during students’ regular class periods. The procedure consisted of the following steps. First, the participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions. Then, the participants signed the consent form and completed the pre-writing test to see if the two groups were comparable. The next step was administering the self-efficacy survey. After that, students in both groups were provided with the same instruction sheet asking them to write an opinion essay in which they said whether the distracted driving law in the UAE should be changed. Below are the instructions:

Read the text(s) below carefully and then write an essay answering the following question:

Should the UAE distracted driving law be changed? Remember to use ideas from the text (s).

Participants were required to stick closely to the text(s) in their responses. In this manner, students were engaged in source-based activities including summarizing, quoting, paraphrasing, and citing. Students in both groups were given 45 min to read the text (s), and plan and type their essay. After the students completed the writing task, they were invited to respond to the self-efficacy survey a second time. Reducing the amount of time between the pretest and posttest was necessary to limit maturation threats. Each essay was rated by two raters individually and then discussed to form a consensus. Raters included two Ph.D. students who were trained by the researcher on the use of the scoring rubric.

Data analysis

The Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients of the survey items ranged between 0.885 (pre-writing) and 0.994 (post-writing), and the internal reliability could be regarded as adequate (Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994). Furthermore, each subscale’s reliability and validity were tested and verified and all values in the subscales were acceptable for inferential statistic tests. Survey items were analyzed quantitatively through descriptive statistics. Differences between the pre-writing and post-writing survey items were examined using descriptive statistics and paired-sample t-tests. We compared the means of each subscale to allow us to examine in detail the students’ perceived self-efficacy in different categories (i.e. confidence to cite, confidence to organize papers, confidence to paraphrase, etc.).

To test the rubric for reliability, the researcher scored 23 student papers (13 from the multiple-source group and 10 from the single-source group). The results obtained from the Alpha Cronbach inter-rater reliability test indicated that there is a highly significant inter-reliability of the two scorers’ ratings. The alpha data obtained for the single-source group was 0.81 and the alpha data obtained for the multiple-source group was 0.87 which is close to 1. These results indicate that the evaluation was not excessively subjective. The resulting essays from both groups were coded for instances of source integration. Students’ attempts were identified and coded into exact copies, borrowed phrases and words, and paraphrased (Keck, 2006).

Results

First research question

The overall mean scores obtained by the students in the two groups were compared to see whether either of the groups performed significantly better than the other. Table 2 provides an overview of the means and standard deviations of the two groups:

Table 2 Overall writing performance in single-source vs. multiple-source groups.
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Results revealed that the overall score of students in the multiple-source condition is slightly higher than the overall score in the single-source condition. Nevertheless, the difference was not statistically significant since p = 0.126(t = −1.554). This initial result indicates that variation in the number of sources did not result in significant differences in the student’s performance.

Analysis of the scores obtained on the four writing aspects of content, source use, organization, and language use showed a different pattern. The results are shown in Table 3.

Table 3 Differences in mean task scores for source-based writing aspects.
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From the results, it can be seen that the students in the multiple-source condition performed better in content than their counterparts in the single-source condition. Mean score comparisons show that differences between the two groups of students in terms of content were statistically significant with a medium effect size (t = −2.52; p = <0.02; d = 0.67). This result suggests that students’ performance in the area of content was affected by the number of sources given.

To further illustrate this difference, we identified information in student writing that appeared to be derived from the source texts. Many students in the multiple-source condition selected ideas from the given texts for inclusion in their papers which yielded longer and more detailed writing. In comparison, students in the single-source condition seemed to rely more on their ideas and personal beliefs to support their writing. The excerpts below illustrate the differences with regard to content between the two groups:

Single source (Excerpt # 1)

The main reason is that distracted driving causes many traffic accidents and the street will be crowded with too many cars. So if you were calling someone while you hit a car there will be 1000 Dirham that you need to pay and also 3 black points. Also in the United Arab Emirates, there’s a lot of accidents but the most city with a lot of accident is Dubai. Why? because of phone. But there’s no radar to catch people with phone that’s why Abu Dhobi has radars for the people who use their phone while driving.

Multiple sources (Excerpt # 2)

Driver inattentiveness is the main cause of many serious traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi. Use of a cell phone or texting while driving can lead to a fine of AED 800 along with four black points. Campaign aims to reduce traffic deaths to three per 100,000 residents by 2021. Abu Dhabi Police have released a video clip, showing variety of traffic accidents that have occurred due to driver inattentiveness. A year-long campaign has been put in situ to alert motorists regarding the risks of distracted driving. This campaign intends to reduce the death toll due to road accidents by 25% in the second last quarter of this year compared to the same quarter last year.

The excerpts above demonstrate that the student in the single-source condition relied mainly on his own knowledge about traffic fines in the city of Dubai to support his opinion whereas the student in the multiple-source condition drew on information in the given sources. As could be seen from excerpt 2 where students were exposed to four sources, the writing appeared to be more text-based.

Differences were also apparent with regard to source use which primarily assessed the ability to integrate information from sources into their essays through summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting (t = 0.620; p = <0.538). The mean score for the multiple-source group was slightly higher than the mean score of the students in the single-source condition suggesting that the students who had been given more sources were more likely to perform better at summarizing main ideas and paraphrasing. Nevertheless, this difference was not statistically significant.

An examination of students’ papers shows that students in the single-source condition made fewer attempts at paraphrasing and integrating source materials into their own writing. The majority of (16 of the 29) students did not integrate source material at all while 7 students made one attempt. Only six students made more than one attempt at integrating information. These results confirm our previous finding that students who were given one source had not engaged with the source as deeply as their peers who were given four sources. Texts produced by the multiple-source group exhibited more source integration. All students made at least one attempt at source integration. Therefore, while the single-source students made 19 attempts in total, there were 87 attempts in the multiple-source group.

The attempts from both groups were classified into exact copies, borrowed materials, or paraphrase (Keck, 2006). The results of the analysis are presented in Table 4.

Table 4 Frequency of source integration attempts.
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Overall, results suggest that the majority of source integration attempts were made by students in the multiple-source group. Generally, results revealed that students used source material in three ways:

The most common way was borrowing words and phrases from the source texts. In the following excerpts, the strings of words that students borrowed from source texts are underlined:

Multiple sources (Excerpt # 3)

Abu Dhabi Police have put in place some strict laws to prevent the use of tools that distract drivers such as phones, eating, and drinking to reduce the number of casualties.

Single source (Excerpt # 4)

I think the law by same because distracted driving is known as the act of driving while being engaged in other activities.

The second way was copying exactly the sentences without integration or paraphrasing. Below are some excerpts from students’ writing. The copied or plagiarized materials are also underlined:

Multiple sources (Excerpt # 5)

Distraction is the main reason for the high rate of accidents, and it is the first reason for the loss of drivers’ lives. Distracted driving kills. The friends, family, and neighbors of the thousands of people killed each year in distracted driving crashes

Single source (Excerpt # 6)

Distracted driving can lead to a fine worth AED 800 and 4 black points on your driving license. I think the law should remain the same because the driver plays on phone a lot and not look at road.

The third way was paraphrasing and elaborating on the ideas found in the source text(s) as shown in the examples below where students were successful at paraphrasing the main points in the given texts and using them as support for their claim:

Multiple sources (Excerpt # 7)

Distracted drivers are those who are preoccupied with something else and take their hands off the steering wheel and their eyes off the road. Distracted drivers fall into two categories: those who are mentally distracted, such as those who are busy thinking about things on their minds, and those who are physically distracted, such as those who are using their phones, eating something, drinking something, or chatting with a friend while maintaining eye contact.

Multiple sources (Excerpt # 8)

I agree with Mr. Lehmann with what he said about being busy on the phone, the driver can stop on the shoulder of the road and talk if it is an emergency or any other reason, for everyone’s safety, he must stop on the shoulder of the road.

Single source (Excerpt # 9)

I think these topics are more significant to our country, there are some reasons about using phone while driving. First of all, the phone has law because it distracts the people on the road and it has a violation of 1000 AED with 12 traffic points. For example, if the person uses a phone while driving and sent a voice note or looks for a video these will distract him from the road like his hands and eyes.

These results confirm the challenges involved in source-based writing as both groups seemed to have struggled with paraphrasing and summarizing regardless of the number of sources.

On the other hand, the two groups performed similarly in organization suggesting that the number of sources does not affect the organization of papers (t = −0.216; p = 0.829). The essays were very similar in how the information was organized. In the majority of cases, students organized their essays into three paragraphs, with an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Three students from the multiple-source group failed to provide a concluding paragraph. These findings suggest that the students have probably internalized the typical structure of the essay that they learned during their previous courses. Nevertheless, their most noticeable weakness was in coherence and flow of ideas. There were numerous instances where the students failed to connect their sentences using basic linkers. Below is an excerpt from a student’s essay which demonstrates the lack of connectives and the frequent use of “and”:

Excerpt # 10

Abu Dhabi Police plays an important role in traffic safety, and the power of light towards traffic safety greatly. Because its main goal is the safety of society, the Abu Dhabi Police has developed a list of violations, which operates periodically throughout the day, with cameras called the Eye of the Falcon, as it violates those who are busy with the phone, and those who are not committed to fastening the seat belt, and its security is much.

As evident, differences were also minimal and non-significant in language use (t = 0.115; p = 0.909) indicating that the number of sources had no impact on students’ linguistic performance. The low scores obtained in both groups suggest that they failed to use language variably and effectively while writing from sources. Overall, both groups struggled with sentence structure and vocabulary. The most common errors found in students’ papers included subject-verb agreement, article omission, incorrect words, word order, and preposition errors.

Second research question

The second objective of the study was to determine whether writing from multiple sources was more effective than writing from a single source in improving students’ self-efficacy in writing. To this end, we compared students’ beliefs about their abilities to write from sources before the start of the task and after the completion of the task.

To analyze the change in students’ self-efficacy beliefs, we ran paired-sample t-tests to measure change from pre to post on each of our subscales (writing-related abilities, reading-related abilities, and source use skills). Results are shown in Table 5:

Table 5 Change in students’ self-efficacy beliefs across three subscales.
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The analysis demonstrated that the multiple-source group exhibited an increase in self-efficacy beliefs in reading-related abilities where they grew by 0.51 points; The difference was statistically significant. By contrast, the single-source group showed a decrease in their self-efficacy beliefs with regard to reading-related abilities by 0.25 points which was also statistically significant (t(28) = 2.342, p = 0.027, d = 0.57). Perhaps this decrease occurred because they had less interaction with the source and relied more on their own ideas, unlike the multiple-source group who had spent more effort reading the sources and selecting relevant content.

Results also revealed that students in the multiple-source group grew their self-efficacy beliefs for the use of sources by 0.41 points compared to their peers in the single-source group who showed a minimal increase by 0.08 points. However, the change for both groups was not statistically significant meaning that the number of sources did not affect their confidence in integrating source materials.

With regards to writing-related self-efficacy beliefs, students in the multiple-source group showed a minimal increase of 0.04 points, whereas students in the single-source group had a decrease of 0.1 points. The small increases and decreases observed in both groups regarding writing-related abilities were not statistically significant, meaning that the number of sources did not affect students’ confidence in performing writing-related activities.

Discussion

This study aimed to determine whether providing students with multiple sources instead of a single source affects their source-based writing performance and self-efficacy beliefs. Our findings demonstrated that although students in two groups were provided with different numbers of sources, there was no significant difference in their overall writing performance which suggests that the use of multiple sources does not necessarily contribute to better overall writing quality. However, it should be noted that the limited time period for this study (45 min) may have contributed to the lack of substantial differences in writing performance. Previous research has shown that writing skills develop gradually over an extended period of time (Hillocks, 1986; Chandler, 2003). Thus, future research conducted over a longer duration may provide more insight into the impact of writing from multiple sources versus writing from a single source on writing performance.

Even though there was no statistically significant difference in the overall writing performance between the two groups, a significant distinction was observed regarding their reliance on the source texts. The multiple-source group outperformed the single-source group on content-related scores and produced more text-based essays indicating that they were more engaged with the source material. In comparison, the students who wrote from a single source relied more on their own background knowledge and selected fewer ideas from the source text. One plausible explanation for this result is that the single source group believed that they only needed to include some ideas as long as they were given one source. It is likely that providing students with a range of sources may better direct their attention towards the texts’ ideas. This finding is in line with many other researchers such as Anmarkrud et al. (2014) who found that in writing from multiple sources students show better engagement with the texts through evaluating, monitoring, and cross-document linking.

In addition, the study revealed that both single-source and multiple-source groups encountered difficulties in integrating sources into their writing. The students in the single-source group relied heavily on direct copying and failed to effectively incorporate the selected information into their writing. On the other hand, the multiple-source group made more attempts at using source materials, but they still struggled with paraphrasing the borrowed materials. Despite being taught how to integrate sources, both groups found it challenging to apply these skills, which is consistent with previous research findings that highlighted the difficulties of writing from sources (Mateos and Solé, 2009).

The findings related to the organization were quite surprising. Despite the differences in the number of sources and how the ideas were presented, there were no significant differences between the two groups in how they organized the ideas in their papers. Although their writing was difficult to follow, the vast majority of students in both groups organized their writing into a typical essay with an introduction, a conclusion, and a body paragraph. This result indicates that the number of sources did not have a significant impact on the organization of the essays. Therefore, writing from a single source was able to yield fairly well-organized essays as writing from multiple sources. We may speculate that the reason why the students in both groups had no significant differences in terms of organization could be attributed to previous instruction where they performed source-based tasks using templates.

It was also somewhat surprising that the two different tasks elicited comparable levels of language use for the two groups. Initially, it was expected that students provided with multiple sources would be able to use more complex language in accordance with previous research conducted on the positive effect of task complexity on syntactic and lexical complexity (Golparvar and Rashidi, 2021). However, results demonstrated that students in both conditions performed similarly with regard to language use. A possible explanation for this non-significant difference may be that none of the students in both groups seemed to have mastered language skills.

The results from the self-efficacy survey provide the first evidence that writing from multiple sources may contribute to students’ self-efficacy beliefs. Our results revealed that students in the multiple-source condition showed significant gains in their reading-related self-efficacy beliefs, possibly due to the challenge of integrating sources, which is consistent with previous findings that mastery experiences, as well as increased task complexity, can enhance self-efficacy (Pajares et al., 2007; Rahimi and Zhang, 2019). In comparison, the self-efficacy survey results showed a significant decrease in reading-related self-efficacy beliefs of the single-source group. This significant result could support the conclusion that exposure to multiple sources during the writing process likely prompted the development of reading processing strategies, which in turn helped the students gain confidence in their reading-related abilities whereas lack of interaction with the source text did not provide students with sufficient mastery experience to improve their confidence level. Nevertheless, the self-efficacy beliefs of both groups in our study did not increase significantly on all subscales of the survey which suggests that the number of sources may not have a significant effect on students’ confidence in performing writing-related and source integration activities. Indeed, it is unlikely that all aspects of the students’ source-based writing self-efficacy beliefs would improve significantly over such a short period between the pretest and posttest. Further research is needed to investigate the change in self-efficacy over a longer period of time.

Implications

The findings of this study might bear theoretical and pedagogical implications for source-based writing. On a theoretical level, evidence from this study lends support to the classic knowledge-telling/knowledge-transforming composition models. The knowledge-telling approach involves recalling information directly from memory, while the knowledge-transforming approach involves generating ideas through reflection and active problem-solving. Our findings supported the idea that students who write using multiple sources tend to engage in a more active process of organizing, selecting, and connecting information.

On the pedagogical level, the present findings shed light on the challenges involved in source-based writing tasks. This study provides some initial insights into how students can be supported while writing from sources. It is crucial to recognize that writing from sources can be a daunting and unfamiliar task, particularly for inexperienced students. Therefore, teachers should prioritize helping students become familiar with the text(s) before anything else. Our results demonstrated that the multiple-source group showed significant improvement in their self-efficacy beliefs on reading-related abilities, which may have been partially due to their increased engagement with the sources during the reading process. Therefore, it might be a good idea to design source-based tasks that first provide students with the opportunity to answer reading comprehension questions, complete graphic organizers, take notes, and gather evidence from the text (s) before starting the writing task. After making sense of the text, students need to understand what writing from sources looks like and what synthesizing ideas means. Additionally, it would be useful to explicitly discuss specific rubric elements and demonstrate proper citation practices.

Limitations

The study highlights some differences and similarities in the performance and self-efficacy beliefs of students who were provided with multiple sources and their peers who had been given one source. Nevertheless, as with any study, there are some limitations that might narrow the generalizability of the results. First, the sample is not representative of the full range of learners who write from sources. Second, the study included mainly males which could have affected the results. Including a larger sample and an equal number of males and females may reveal more differences between the groups. Third, the study included only one task for each group, which reduced the number of analyses that could be made. Fourth, we focused on students’ written products and did not investigate their writing processes during the reading and composing process because our research questions primarily aimed to explore the quality and effectiveness of their final written outputs rather than the specific steps or strategies they employed while writing. Furthermore, investigating the writing processes requires the use of think-aloud protocols which might interfere with the main writing task. Future avenues for research include a comparison of writing processes during single-source use and multiple-source use experiences using a combination of think-aloud and self-report techniques.

Conclusion

Our study has highlighted differences and similarities in performance and self-efficacy beliefs between a group of students who were provided with a single source and their counterparts who were provided with multiple sources. The results indicate that the number of sources did not necessarily contribute to improved overall source-based writing performance. However, students in the multiple-source group made more source integration attempts and relied more on the given sources. Also, our analysis has revealed that writing from multiple sources may improve students’ self-efficacy regarding reading-related abilities. Our findings can be useful for designing and sequencing source-based tasks that can improve students’ performance and self-efficacy beliefs.