Assessment of Academic Literacy

Authors

  • Fernando Guzmán-Simón University of Sevilla
  • Eduardo García-Jiménez University of Sevilla

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7203/relieve.21.1.5147

Keywords:

Assessment of learning, discourse community, academic literacy, Higher Education

Abstract

Academic literacy has become one of the aims in Higher Education, where writing has turned into a learning tool.  The Spanish Qualifications Framework for Higher Education (MECES) grades the expected learning outcomes in university students regarding academic literacy of official Bachelor, Masters and Doctorate degrees.  The assessment of academic literacy is considered as a discourse community where the object and objective, the tasks, the practices, the criteria and assessment standards all center on the process of epistemic writing in an academic context.  An assessment for learning and the involvement of students in the processes of feedback and feedforward enable their inclusion into an academic discourse community.  In this paper, the concept of academic literacy is reexamined as well as the research perspectives that support it.  In addition, the nature of academic writing is analyzed and the elements which form the assessment process, from the perspective of the academic discourse communities, are shown.  Lastly, guidelines are offered for training students in academic literacy in today’s university.

Author Biographies

Fernando Guzmán-Simón, University of Sevilla

Professor of Didactics of Language and Literature in the School of Education at the University of Seville. His research centers on the evaluation of linguistic abilities at the preschool education level and the processes of academic literacy, in the development of evaluation instruments as well as its validation.  He is a member of the research group EVALfor: Evaluacion in training contexts

Eduardo García-Jiménez, University of Sevilla

Full Professor of Research and Diagnostic Methods in Education and member of the research group EVALfor: Evaluacion in training contexts (SEJ-509). In recent years, his efforts have been centered on the development of procedures and evaluation instruments in education, through computer applications, to be used by professors and teachers who work at different educational levels such as EVALCOMIX, DIPEVAL y HEVAFOR

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Published

2015-05-07

Issue

Section

Special Section