ASSESSING STUDENTS COMPETENCIES AND LEARNING IN MASTER THESIS PROJECTS: TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED EVALUATION APPROACH

Over the past few years we have observed an increasingly interest in how to help students in higher education to develop their generic skills. It is also relevant at the level of the Master thesis, considering that it is the final and often crucial part of the graduate degree which requires many generic skills. Nonetheless very little research has directly focused on them. In the context of the Bologna process initiated by the European Union, there is an emphasis on the development of generic skills. Even though general lists of generic skills have been developed no specific prior work has focused on Master thesis projects in detail.

Regarding the master’s degree, the Helsinki Conference on master’s-level degrees (Helsinki 2003, 4 – an offshoot of the Bologna declaration) stated that students who are awarded a master’s degree: must have achieved the level of knowledge and understanding, or high level in artistic competence when appropriate, which allows them to integrate knowledge, and handle complexity, formulate judgements and communicate their conclusions to an expert and to a non-expert audience. Students with a master’s degree will have the learning skills needed to pursue further studies or research in a largely self-directed, autonomous manner.

This definition has been ascertained to cover a broad range of master’s degrees in different knowledge areas. Concerning the professional master`s programmes, some particular aspects are crucial, such as the development of critical thinking and problem-solving abilities, as well as the importance of self-directed learning. In spite of some outcomes, there remains and important gap in how these outcomes expected by graduated master students are to be achieved, or how to evaluate whether these outcomes have been attained.

Therefore, in this paper we discuss the preliminary results of the application of the process of developing an integrated assessment model for the evaluation of the generic competencies developed by the students in the framework of their Final Master Thesis Projects (FMT).

This study is conducted in the context of a Spanish Business School, applied to different Master degree programme. The objective is focused on the identification of which generic skills are needed and developed in a FMT. Therefore, this paper is double folded. On the one hand we use a survey to ask the students which generic skills they consider that should be needed and developed in their FMT, and on the other, we explore the elaboration process as well as validation process of tools to gather information and evidences in order to assess the final results of the FMT being submitted by the students at the end of their learning journey.

The methodology applied is also double folded. We use a survey to assess the student’s perspectives and we conduct a Delphi study to validate a set of variables and specific indicators to build up an assessment tool in order to be used for the evaluation of the FMT projects.