Assessing Readiness to Write: The Design of an Assessment of Preparedness to Present Multimodal Information (APPMI)

Conversations about students’ academic writing in the higher education context generally tend to centre on the usual suspects – students’ inability to master the conventions of academic writing; the degree to which they struggle to analyse writing topics, construct social identities, develop sound and logical arguments; write well-formulated sentences and paragraphs; and apply what they have learned across different contexts (Cliff, 2015; Maloney, 2003; Pineteh, 2014). These challenges are, however, not limited to undergraduate students at tertiary institutions. Academic staff often say the same of the majority of their postgraduate students who have not yet mastered the conventions of academic writing,