A STUDY OF READING AND WRITTEN SKILLS OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS THROUGH SYNTHESIS TASKS

Abstract

The present research compares the reading and writing skills of students from two Spanish universities at the beginning and at the end of their studies of Graduate in Primary Education Teaching. An exploratory research design with cross-sectional observations was selected to replace the absence of random assignment. From the inferential statistical analysis of the data, collected through a questionnaire and a test of basic reading comprehension skills that requires the performance of two synthesis tasks, it can be seen that there are no significant differences between study groups. The results obtained show a lower level of comprehension competence than expected for university students, due to their difficulties in identifying important ideas at paragraph level and in organizing these ideas hierarchically by elaborating a concept map. It is observed that these students, regardless of the stage of their education and the university in which they are enrolled, do not use adequate task models that allow them to obtain satisfactory results. These findings may be of interest for university institutions responsible for initial teacher training to analyze the reading comprehension skills of their students, as well as to develop teacher training plans in this area.