LEARNING BY COLLABORATIVE EVALUATION: A PROBLEM BASED METHODOLOGY TO ENGAGE STUDENTS IN THE COURSE MATERIAL

It is often argued that motivation is one of the key factors in successfully passing a course. Courses containing a large list of topics commonly discourage students even with teaching methodologies heavily oriented to practice such as case study, discussion forum, role playing, and gallery walk, among other known techniques. If used incorrectly, practice oriented teaching can cause passive behaviour toward the subject, pigeonholing students into mere recipients of assignments (e.g. problem and case statements) that they have to solve.

The present work reports our experience using Collaborative Evaluation, which is a teaching strategy based on problem solution and conceived to fully engage students in the course material by making them active participants of their assignments design and evaluation. The collaborative evaluation was implemented as an innovative teaching experience in the mandatory course Industrial Thermodynamic Processes, taught in the third year of the Degree in Industrial Engineering at Carlos III University of Madrid. In this course the students learn applied engineering thermodynamics. Nearly 200 students attend the course every year, so the selected teaching strategy has to be capable of efficiently dealing with a large number of students. Starting with a description of the Collaborative Evaluation methodology, the results of applying this teaching strategy are analyzed in this work together with their educational implications.