What does writing mean to Civil Engineering Freshmen Students? An approach through Social Representations

Abstract

Writing, though it is one of the most important skills for production and transmission of knowledge, represents one of the biggest problems that freshmen students face when starting higher education. Given this, in the last couple of years different programs  have been created in the Universities that seek to fill this emptiness that students bring from high school education (Carlino, 2013). This research stands upon the reorientation of one of those corrective courses. One of the essential methods to set up a writing course for the objective users is through the investigation of their representations about the subject (González & Rivera, 2009). Thus, the objective of this research is to describe the social representations around writing that arose from 51 freshmen students’ written speech from a Civil Engineering program. The data analysis was based on the procedures of the Grounded Theory. The results show that students perceive writing differently whether it is hard copy writing or a digital copy. In addition, results also show that they do not possess a systematic knowledge about the procedures they need to follow when writing.