Abstract:

This work presents the design and application of an indicator to measure students’ perception of their degree of acquisition of a soft skill: self-learning ability and responsibility, one of the 6 transversal competences of the University of Barcelona. The indicator has been developed based on a series of surveys carried out to first-year business management students of the University of Barcelona during the 2019-20 academic year. The objective of the work is to explain the designing process of the indicator, as well as to present the first results of its application to that specific cohort. Two surveys have been taken: one at the beginning of the course (which measures the expectations of the students regarding their perceived self-learning ability and responsibility) and the other at the end of the course (which measures how student actually performed during the course regarding their self-learning ability and responsibility). A comparison between the results of these two surveys seems to indicate that students often had higher expectations regarding their self-learning ability and responsibility than what they ended up performing throughout the subject. However, these results should be taken with a grain of salt, since the course was affected by uncertainty and changes to teaching/learning processes related to the COVID19 pandemic. Consequently, it will be convenient to compare these findings with those obtained in subsequent years. It should also be noted that there are factors such as age, gender, the entry grade or the origin of previous studies, which may have some explanatory role in students’ perception of their acquisition of the competence, but that have not been included in this first exploration. Finally, responding to the survey makes students to reflect on their self-learning process, which is also useful. Being able to focus from the beginning of university life on the possible gap between what the student aspires to do and what he/she actually does, could result in better adaptation and, perhaps, better achievements and competence acquisition. After confirming these results, the next step will consist of investigating the connection between the acquisition of this competence and the academic results of students (in terms of average qualifications, percentage of dropping subjects, etc.).

Keywords:

Soft Skills, indicator, learning perception.