EARLY IDENTIFICATION OF THE STUDENT’S LEVEL IN THE TRANSVERSAL COMPETENCE “CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP”

Universities are redesigning their curricula according with new academic-professionals profiles. These new profiles require specific and transversal competences, understood as "the set of knowledge, skills and attitudes to be able to mobilize a person, in an integrated manner to respond effectively to the demands of a given context" [1]. Specific competences belong to a specific area of knowledge and they are aimed at achieving a specific graduate profile. Transversal competences are generic and transferable in a wide variety of personal, social, academic and professional contexts throughout life [2].

The initial level of competence in a student related to the non-transversals competences can be identified through the structure of the previous studies that has been attended. In this way, the teacher has a reference about what to teach in depth and amplitude. However with regards to transversal competences, the initial level achieved by the students is not easy to determine, and most teachers act in the same way in both cases.

When a teacher starts his or her activity in a new group of students, the skills of these students about effective communication, critical thinking or teamwork are unknown to the teacher, but in some cases they assume that the students have a determined level for each competence and they develop activities according to these “supposed” level.

Our expertise acquired in the previous innovation projects has left in evidence that, activities with a specific purpose that we develop in our classes, can give us contrary results or achieve different impact into the students.

The transversal competence “creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship” is not out of this problem, when the activities developed in class do not take into account the student’s needs in particular. 

The proposal developed in this paper focus on identifying the student’s initial level in the competence to adapt the teaching-learning process to the different levels found in our classroom. 

Hence, the general objective consists of identifying the students according to different levels in the competence “creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship”, with the aim of defining different roadmaps that allow to improve their properly achievement of this competence. 
In a more concrete way, the detailed objectives to accomplish are:
1. Designing a scale to identify levels of achievement of the competence.
2. Designing basic activities to assessment creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship competences for each student. 
3. Assessing the initial level of each student in the transversal competence (through the activities designed in the objective 2).
This proposal incorporates the student as a key element in the teaching-learning process. 

Acknowledgements:
This research has been carried out under the project of innovation and educational improvement (PIME 2017-18 Ref.A10) funded by the Universitat Politècnica de València and the School of Informatics.

References:
[1] Perrenoud, Ph. "Diez nuevas competencias para enseñar." Educatio Siglo XXI 23 (2005): 223-229.
[2] Boza A. , Fernández-Diego M., Ruiz L., Gordo ML., Alemany MME, Alarcón F., Cuenca L., (2017) Transversal Competences as a Medium of Teaching. The Case of Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.pp3-10 In: Kavoura A., Sakas D., Tomaras P. (eds) Strategic Innovative Marketing. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham