Challenges in Argumentation and Paraphrasing Among Beginning Students in Educational Sciences

ABSTRACT

The present study aimed to identify difficulties in writing at the beginning of educational science programmes in the Finnish Open University by analysing the students’ written argumentation and use of sources at the textual level. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The results showed that many students began their educational studies with weak writing competencies. While many of the problems were directly related to students’ failure to explain the ideas in their sources in their own words, some problems pertained to other aspects, such as the inability to construct convincing arguments. Understanding the nature of the problems in writing encountered by beginning students in educational sciences can help teachers foster students’ participation in academic discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Writing
• argumentation
• paraphrasing
• higher education

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Roger Benjamin at the Council for Aid to Education for permitting us to use and reproduce a performance task from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, and to Taina Lehtinen (Licentiate in Social Sciences), Saara Repo (Ph.D.), Erja Rusanen (Ph.D. in education), Auli Toom (Ph.D., Assistant Professor) for helping us in data collection.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The first author was financially supported by a scholarship from the Alfred Kordelin Foundation. This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under Grant 252813 to the second author.