Meet Kayleigh DeBrico and Katerina Zakonova: Bridging the Gap: Adapting IMRaD to Meet Student Needs

Kayleigh DiBrico (she/her) and Katerina Zakanova (they/them) attend New York University. DiBrico is a 4th-year undergraduate student studying music, and Zakanova is a 1st year graduate student who studied dance education. These two authors specialize in investigating research reading and writing anxiety. The hope is for students to read and write with more confidence. 

DiBrico’s and Zakanova’s article Bridging the Gap: Adapting IMRaD to Meet Student Needs describes how to improve undergraduate and graduate students’ communication and rhetorical analysis ability. Anxiety is the main obstacle students experience when doing writing tasks. The plan was to use a method known as IMRad, a model dividing a research project into the following categories: Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion. DiBrico and Zakanova aimed to identify how the IMRaD model helps students deal with anxiety and writer’s block. One key takeaway from their article is that 87% of respondents to the expanded structure were aided through this model. In conclusion, analyzing the rhetorical methods of research articles was very effective in improving a student’s reading comprehension. 

Zakanova and DiBrico’s research process was a continuation of previous undergraduate research. They submitted to YSW  because they felt these topics were something that so many students could relate to. Choosing this topic allowed them to help students gain confidence in their reading and writing as well as empower them in their research journeys. While conducting their research, the authors read plenty of research articles, analyzed their structure, and analyzed articles themselves to better understand where the difficulties arose when reading these published research articles. Zakanova and DiBrico credit their faculty advisory editor (FAE) with making the publishing process go smoothly. Their FAE was easy to reach at all times and always gave detailed and thoughtful feedback. Working with their FAE was the most rewarding part of the revision process for them and a big help overall. 

As mentioned before, the YSW drafting and revision process was beneficial. Even with the authors being new to the drafting and revision process, YSW made the revision process easier by making it clearer and more manageable. The main challenge the authors faced was their stamina when it came to writing. They had to take a step back and look at their writing from an outside perspective, which is not always easy to do in the writing process. As a take-home message, the authors state how important it is to “take advantage of peer review as often as possible to gain multiple perspectives on your writing.”  Overall, publishing through YSW introduced these authors to the many different aspects of the publication process. 

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This post was initially developed through a partnership between Dr. Cutrufello’s Fall 2024 Digital Writing students, who interviewed the author and drafted the posts, and Dr. Beam’s Fall 2024 WRT410: Editing and Style students, who handled the first round of edits. Shelby Welch edited it and updated it for publication.