Browsing by Author "Pahkala, Mari"

Goals. Generic skills are skills that are needed in every field of study and occupation. The term generic skills has been used widely especially during the past few decades because of the rapid change in society and working life. Thus, skills mentioned above are also important study skills that every student needs during the higher education studies. The aim of this study was to find out what kind of text-related generic skills first year class teacher students have. Methods. The data used in the study was gathered as a part of the Learning Generic Skills during University Teaching and Learning research project (Hyytinen, Toom & Lindblom-Ylänne 2012). Generic skills were studied using the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) that is a standardized testing instrument designed to test critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communicational skills. The data consisted of 45 CLA answers written by the first year class teacher students in University of Helsinki, and it was gathered in Fall 2013. In order to examine students' writing skills in a more specific way, the answers that got the highest and the lowest scores in the CLA analysis were studied using Rich feature analysis. Results & Conclusions. The study showed that the generic skills among the first year class teacher students were mediocre: the amount of the answers with low or average CLA scores were high, whereas answers with high scores were rarely found in the data. The most significant problems were found in the synthetisation of given information, but also the skills of argumentation were generally poor. The rich feature analysis showed that uses of conjunctions and different theme structures varied between the answers with high and low CLA scores, and that these had impact on the logic and the coherence of the texts. There were also differences between the two studied groups regarding to the dialogic occurring in the texts. In the answers with high CLA scores the elements of dialogic (reporting clause, summary and interpretation) could always be pointed out; in the answers with low CLA scores the dialogic was not always clear and the elements of dialogic could not always be distinguished.