Att förmedla egna och andras tankar : Om gymnasisters källhantering i det nationella provets skrivuppgift

The material for this report consists of 55 student texts written in the national test of Swedish during the last compulsory course in the upper secondary school (18–19 year-olds). The task was to argue for more literature and reading for children in order to develop the children’s language, reasoning skills and fantasy. The student texts are to be seen as contributions to the debate in a local newspaper. Consideration is also given to the test material, that is texts both fiction and non-fiction, and the written instruction. The aim of the study is to investigate how the students handle the demand to use ideas and thoughts from the texts they have read before the actual writing test. Teachers sometimes find this part of the task hard to assess and ask for strict guidelines in the assessment material. The texts show that the students generally know that they are supposed to use facts and thoughts from the texts, and most of them also know that they are supposed to give references to the texts they quote from or refer to. Chapter 3 lists different ways of referring, from the elegant or neat to very circumstantial references or no reference at all. Using some part of a text without a reference is called “theft” for pedagogical reasons. A frequent pattern is to give a reference the first time a text is used but not the second or third time. Chapter 4 goes deeper into what the students choose to refer to or quote, that is how the content of the texts is made use of. The majority of the students get facts from two of seveal possible sources and build their argumentation on those. Only one shows a critical approach towards the texts in question. The student texts are also compared with published contributions to the debate in a local newspaper. First the question of voice in the two text materials is studied. The students speak more as an “I” and the published debaters as a “we” Then references in the newspaper texts are compared to those in the school texts. The recommen