Reflections on social representations about being a university student and being evaluated

Abstract

In this article we propose an analysis of the social representations that on being evaluated are built in a population group made up of first-year students of the Bachelor of Social Communication at the National University of Entre Ríos. The objective of this research was to ask what are the feelings and identifications built regarding their condition as a student and what are the everyday meanings that they attribute to being evaluated. As regards to metodology, our analysis links and explores the relationship between operational categories designed for this study, which emerged from the interpretation of the discourses of girls and boys in semi-structured interviews and discussion groups, in the light of grounded theory. As for reference theories, and following the Moscow tradition, it recovers as a theoretical category the notion of social representation of both Abric, Jodelet, and Moscovici himself, as product and process of a mental activity by which an individual or a group reconstitutes the reality it faces and attributes a specific significance to it. Our work also goes to the concept of cultural capital (Bourdieu) understood in its incorporated state, which we conceive as the predispositions to the knowledge and skills accumulated and inherited by a class. This study is proposed as a contribution that allows us to think about the evaluation from the perspective of the evaluated university students, studying it situated in a specific setting, which allows us to get closer to a better understanding of their experience in university life.