Evaluation of consecution of transversal competencies in higher educationStudent perceptions

Resumo

The Bologna Process came to change the whole higher education system in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century. However, after ten years of its deployment, it is proved that the new paradigms that should be ruling the higher education still have serious flaws. For example, the trade-off between traditional assessment and competence guide assessment is not equally balanced through all the degrees inside the same country, and even worse, for the degrees offered by a university.In previous research, we studied the evaluation methods in telecommunication engineering degrees at the University of Jaén and presented new methodologies focused on competitive learning and gamification to increase student motivation and avoid dropouts engaging them with evaluation tasks during the semester. This research detected that students tend to avoid those evaluation tasks during the semester because they can avoid all of them with just a final exam, which usually is the worse solution, increasing failing and dropouts.Those experiments were conducted over third-year students, whereas now, we have focused on first and second-year students to assess their perception about their transversal competencies and to detect the main flaws. We selected those competences because of the serious problems that we have detected in students of last year to carry on with common tasks like writing technical reports, organize oral presentations or deal with teamwork in the laboratory. Therefore, we tried to analyze the problem at earlier stages. Consequently, we have evaluated their perception in transversal competences through a series of surveys and a special task based on making informative videos about theoretical aspects from telecommunication.The preliminary results show that first-year students feel confidents with most of the competences about problem resolution, writing organization and teamwork. However, they feel less confident with an oral presentation and its preparation.Second-year students, which have been surveyed about the experience of making video reports about technologies, show little enthusiasm about teamwork, while they prefer it instead of doing tasks on their own.These experiments suppose an initial approach to establish a more accurate method to measure the acquisition of transversal competences in our telecommunication degrees avoiding classical “only exam” assessment that keeps as the main preference for most lecturers and students yet.