Abstract:

Evaluating professional competences certainly is fundamental in the European Framework of Higher Education, with the aim to increase the quality of education in general, promoting the adequate development of skills in University students. Several researchers have developed works and studies on this subject, all of them focusing on the different subjects of the undergraduate degree or master degree. In our previous works, our Research and Innovation Teaching Team in Energy and Mining Engineering of the University of León, has already developed a tool to evaluate professional competences in the activities of Degree or Master Final Thesis. In this article, the evaluation of professional competences in an internship environment will approach. Nowadays, internships are fundamental in most University degrees, being in many cases evaluable activities or even, integrated into the curriculum. That is why it is also essential to apply, also, the evaluation of these competences in each internship.

First, the progress of an internship has to be analysed thoroughly, then a detailed study using the evaluation criteria of the competencies will carry out. To do this, research will conduct on the subjects of internships, taking the differences of each of the titles of Engineering Degree of the School of Mines of the University of León into consideration, developing for this purpose, a computer tool for its application.

An important distorting element must be taken into account, which is the integration of an agent external to the University in the evaluation, the company tutor, who is usually not present on the University campus. A system of evaluation and qualification will be designed in which the evaluations carried out by the academic tutor and the company tutor will be reflected, obtaining a single final qualification for the internship subject.

For the design of this evaluation tool for internship purposes, assessment scales integrated into a computer application will use. This will achieve a friendly application, which will facilitate the external evaluation work by the company tutor. The evaluation through assessment scales allows the identification of appropriate competence indicators and descriptors of the degrees of completion observed in the student.
Likewise, the student must be able to evaluate the quality of internship carried out. For this, a questionnaire properly designed for this purpose is proposed.

The development of the evaluation tool will also be a Company-University feedback mechanism that can be used as an indicator of quality, through the evaluation of business practices.

Keywords:

Teaching innovation, internship, competences and assessment scales.