1. Narratives on writing in
Colombian Higher
Education emerging
from online newspapers
Elizabeth Narváez-Cardona

2. Context
The large-scale assessment in Colombian higher
education, called Pruebas del Saber PRO, was
established as mandatory test by the government
since 2010 for students before getting their
undergraduate degrees.
Among other issues, this large-scale assessment
evaluates communicative abilities for writing in
Spanish.

3. Context
This large-scale assessment in Colombian
higher education, Pruebas del Saber PRO,
has become an opportunity to focus on
writing in higher education as a nationwide
important issue.

4. The project perspective
Newspaper narratives could
be seen as written accounts
that become strategic sites to
explore world representations
deployed as public opinion.

5. The project perspective
Therefore, tracking the world
representations (White, 1981;
Johnstone, 1993) created by the
Colombian online newspapers
on higher education writing
would be useful to gain
insights of the national
expectations about such issue.

6. The project goal
This project aimed at identifying
world representations on higher
education writing through evaluation
devices deployed in the newspaper
narratives (Tannen, 1993, Johnstone,
1993; Wortham, 2000).

7. Data collection and the analytic
focus
A data collection based on an online search
enabled to analyze flexibly the plots of 16
newspaper narratives in order to explore
(Labov, 2010; Coffey & Atkinson, 1996):
a) what thematic focus has been selected in
the titles of the narratives?
b) what differences and commonalities
could be identified across the narrative
plots?
c) what "world representations" on higher
education writing could be inferred from
the narratives?

8. Findings
Relevant features of the data
16 news were found
related to the topic:
“writing and Pruebas del
Saber PRO”.
They were published for
different Colombian
online newspapers
between April 17th, 2011
and November 4th, 2012.
The graphic 1 displays the
regions to which these
newspapers belong to and
the numbers indicate the
chronological order in
which the newspaper
narratives were published.

9. Findings
Relevant features of the data
The most of the news matching with
the # 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 and 14
were published by the two most
ancient newspapers in the country,
called El Tiempo y El Espectador,
from which the headquarters are
located in the capital of the country,
Bogotá.
In terms of the spread in which the
online articles were published, most
of the narratives were concentrated
in March 2012.
This data behavior might rely on the
fact that in March 15th, 2012 the
government released the first official
report of the assessment outcomes.

10. Findings
It is noticeable that the newspaper narratives were
embedded into a sequence of retelling starting with the
texts # 3 and # 4.
The contrastive analysis conducted across the narrative
plots showed that in this sequence of newspaper accounts,
the text # 4 could be appointed as the main narrative from
which the remaining 12 narratives were derived.
Consequently, the following accounts derived from this key
text # 4 include within their contents some fragments of this
main narrative.

11. Findings
However, the location of those contents within the retold story can vary. The graphic depicts
this relocating phenomenon across the newspaper narratives.
The actual content used in the key text # 4 for evaluation, the row colored in brown,
becomes the abstract in the following texts # 6 and # 15, and the complication and
orientation in the texts # 8 and # 12, respectively; whereas, the orientation, the row colored
in pink, in the text # 3 becomes the abstract in the texts # 8 and # 12.
This depiction of relocating the contents might show how this process configures new
accounts and interpretation of the main narrative as a creative process of narratives.
Indeed, new contents are also incorporated within the narratives as part of this relocating
process, which are depicting in the rows colored in yellow in the graphic.

12. Findings
What these narratives were about
according to the titles?
Identifying the evaluation devices used in phrasing the titles
were useful to make anticipations about the abstracts of the
narrative plots (Tannen, 1993, Jhonstone, 1993; Wortham,
2000).
Furthermore, some transformations in these abstracts were
identified across the retelling phenomenon; mostly about how
the assessment outcomes were interpreted by different online
newspapers.

13. Findings
What these narratives were about
according to the titles?
Two tendencies emerged from the titles:
1) The first trend could be called “the crisis of the
Colombian Higher Education”, given that 56.25% out of
sixteen titles conveys as "message" that the outcomes
of the large scale assessment are highly discouraging.
2) The second trend could be called “the problem is the
assessment design”, because 12.6% out of 16 titles
redirected the attention from the educational crisis
towards questioning whether the assessment design is
a valid instrument to evaluate the qualities of
Colombian higher education.

14. Findings
What world representations on Higher Education
writing could be inferred from the narratives?
68, 75% of the newspaper narratives included paragraphs
related to writing.
This could suggest that in most of the narratives analyzed,
writing was an important issue for being published by the
newspapers.

15. What world representations on Higher Education
Findings writing could be inferred from the narratives?
The graphic 3 is a useful visual
organizer to summarize this
world representation, which is
basically a hierarchical
organization of the thematic
patterns identified across the
narratives.

16. Reflection
Methodologically speaking, this project was
useful for exploring how the analysis on
retelling sequences of newspaper narratives
was related to changes in the location of
certain contents within the narrative plots
across time.
This analysis was important in understanding
world representations on a specific issue,
which in this case was a large-scale
assessment on higher education writing in
Colombia.