What texts do first-year Psychology students read?

Abstract

What is read in universities is one of the issues considered by studies carried out from the perspectives of Academic Literacies and the Critical Literacy. In this sense, we ask what texts first year Psychology students read. Considering such question, in this paper, we present the analysis of bibliographical material of the first year Psychology major of a public college. This is a quantitative and qualitative study. We have analyzed the 320 texts of the bibliographical material of the nine disciplines of the first year of Psychology major, not only using the categories proposed by Carlino (2005), Padilla (2013) and Padilla, Douglas and Lopez (2007, 2011), but also emergent categories. The results showed the use of booklets, which included photocopies of bibliographical material which may or may not have elements that could help readers contextualize it, such as copies of the front and back of the book, the page with edition data, content, and complete references. The bibliographical material consists of academic texts derived from scientific texts, especially book chapters and teaching slides. Alsok, those texts are predominantly expository or argumentative.