Coherence and cohesion issues in argumentation documents written by engineering students

Coherence and cohesion in written texts are of great importance to efficiently communicate the main ideas that the author wants to convey to the reader. However, it has been previously shown that not only engineering students have deficiencies in these aspects, but also, evaluating these aspects is of great difficulty. For this reason, this research focuses on the application of a methodology to assess the coherence and cohesion of texts written by engineering students of several semesters in careers such as computer systems, electrical and electronics engineering. To do this, an evaluation instrument was created; this instrument allows measuring the performance on these aspects to be measured in an isolated manner in order to clearly identify the difficulties that students have when writing texts. Results show that, although several students manage to present good written documents, there are also many problems in aspects such as the connection of the text, the handling of exophoric and endophoric references, and providing enough information to argue.