Abstract:

This research characterizes relevant reading skills for the understanding of the tax discipline and the factors associated with its development, for students of an Accountant Program in a Business Faculty in a Chilean University.

The Tax Course seeks to address tax discipline, not only from a technical perspective, but also deepening its social, cultural and organizational role, for which reading plays a fundamental role. In addition, this course is inserted in a challenging context, since there are unfavorable diagnoses on the quality of reading in Chile, which does not show differences at the Higher Education level. The Business Faculty and in particular the Accountant Program, shows these same challenges.

A qualitative approach was used with a single case study design, which was the Tax Course, in the Fall and Spring 2018 semester. This subject is located in the VIII semester of the Accountant Program. The design contemplates the raising of reading skills from two different evaluation products elaborated by the students (one from a more technical approach and the other from a more social perspective). The underlying assumption is that the reading skills for understanding the discipline are expressed in a written product.

Each product was evaluated with a rubric, which seeks to identify relevant reading skills and the factors associated with their development. To ensure the content validity of the rubrics, they were subjected to expert judgment as to whether these skills were addressed. Regarding the reliability / validity of use of the rubric, each work was reviewed by eight evaluators, establishing a high grade of concordance of the evaluations.

Subsequently, interviews were conducted with students (whose products were evaluated), in order to characterize their perception regarding their reading skills and the factors that facilitate their development. To do this, a content analysis was carried out on these interviews. From the results obtained it has been possible to characterize the level of performance of the students in relation to the competences studied.

Keywords:

Tax discipline, reading skills, Rubrics.