ANALYSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SPONTANEOUS SKILL ACQUISITION PERTAINING TO WRITING SCIENTIFIC ABSTRACTS AMONG BACHELOR STUDENTS OF PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Philosophy students at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad take many courses which include writing a paper on a relevant topic, but they do not have a course that is devoted particularly to academic writing skills. The idea is that regular practice, combined with reading finished scientific papers for each course, will eventually lead to their spontaneous acquiring the skill needed for writing good scientific papers. This paper examines the effectiveness of such an approach. On a sample of 317 students’ papers written between years 2011 and 2017, the quality of the abstracts of those papers were compared to the number of years that the student who wrote the paper was studying philosophy at the time of writing. The quality of the abstracts was evaluated according to whether they would satisfy each of the five criteria: appropriate length, clearly stated research topic, sufficiently elaborated methodology, clearly stated research results and assessing the consequences and implications of the results. Since the results show no significant correlation, it leads to the conclusion that more experienced students do not necessarily write better scientific abstracts. This indicates that students of philosophy do not consider their written papers as exercises in academic writing. Instituting a special course devoted to teaching skills of academic writing is thus recommended.