Reading ability as a predictor of african american graduate students' technical writing proficiency in the context of statistics courses

Writing result sections of research studies demands that graduate students have adequate abilities to receive, to encode, to translate, and to reproduce content presented in statistical textbooks. These abilities are all aspects of the reading process; therefore, it is likely that reading ability plays a role in the technical writing process. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between reading ability and writing proficiency among 115 African American graduate students enrolled in statistics courses. A canonical correlation analysis revealed that reading ability significantly predicted students ' abilities to write the results of the following four statistical analyses: correlation analysis, independent samples t test, dependent samples t test, and chi-square analysis. Implications are explicated within the context of teaching graduate-level statistics courses.