Reading and writing skills in higher education

Research study aims

To discuss the role of these two skills in Higher Education we studied the students' competence in these fields by analyzing the specific strategies and techniques they perform during their learning and study tasks and, on the other hand, the lecturers' opinions and perceptions on their students’ proficiency levels in these skills and on their role towards the promotion of these skills.

Our aim was to conduct a study to examine the lecturers’ expectations and perceptions of their first-year science and engineering students reading, comprehension and writing skills at four Portuguese state universities. We intended to analyse the level of competence lecturers attributed to their students’ performances, the main difficulties students face during their daily writing tasks according to their lecturers and to examine to what extent these skills are taken into account in evaluation and to determine if lecturers developed specific strategies to help their students with their daily assignments in order to promote their proficiency in this field.

These data was also analysed bearing in mind the results from a questionnaire directed to the students of these same faculty members on their specific levels of performance in these skills and on the role they play in their daily academic tasks. This study was also specially conducted with first-year students mainly because when entering the university students are immediately faced with a multi-faceted task of learning new contents, learning new ways of understanding, interpreting and organizing the new knowledge and learning new ways of writing their knowledge.

This questionnaire directed to the students aimed to identify the Reading and Writing habits of the students, the level of importance attributed by the students to these activities, to point out the main strategies applied during Reading and Writing and their main difficulties, to compare the level of expectations (before coming to the University) with the students’ perceptions about several fields including Reading and, finally, the level of competence of the students in these two areas with their academic performance .


Methodology
Based on two questionnaires directed to science and engineering lecturers and their first-year students from four Portuguese Universities.

The questionnaire directed to the lecturers was filled in 100 lecturers (20.7% of 482 science and engineering lecturers) from four Portuguese Universities University of Aveiro, Porto, Minho and Algarve. The questionnaire directed to the students was filled in by 1000 students of the same universities (about 24% of the total number of first-year students from science and engineering).

The collected data from the questionnaires was analysed using the statistical treatment software Social Sciences Statistical Package- S.P.S.S.11.0 (frequency, descriptive, correlational and inferential tools and parametric and non-parametric statistical tests) based on the scales provided to the subjects and a content analysis for the open-ended questions included in the questionnaire associated with the main difficulties of the students and the strategies applied by lecturers during class.