Abstract:

The European Space for Higher Education (ESHE) involves important changes to several issues within the teaching methodology to be applied in the new degrees. Changes to the teaching methodology inevitably will imply changes in the evaluation methodology. In new evaluation systems, continuous evaluation will prevail over exclusively final evaluation. This paper describes an experience of how an optative subject “New Building Materials” is successfully used to implement a continuous assessment methodology.

The University is currently involved in a deep process of change initiated by the Bologna Declaration that emphasizes the role of the teacher as manager of the learning process. Under this new idea it is necessary to find new evaluation methods where the continuous assessment should prevail over the exclusively final evaluation. One of these new methods of evaluation is the portfolio. The portfolio is a method of teaching, learning and assessment based on the contribution of different types of productions by the student, which are used to judge their capabilities in the context of a discipline or subject study.
The subject is chosen for students on the third or fourth course of Building Engineering career. One of the points to consider before begin the process of continuous assessment was based on providing the student the ability to search and find quality information. In this way and for this reason, some previous classes are given to teach the student to search on bibliographic databases or Google Scholar, with the aim to find discussing articles, reports, news releases, etc, that can be used by the continuous learning process.

One specific problem in teaching at university could be the general passivity and lack of participation among the students. Clearly, if the students would practice more by solving voluntary exercise assignments, they would learn more effectively and also perform better in the exams.
The continuous evaluation divides the purposes of assessment into three categories: giving feedback to students, motivating students and guiding students' learning. These categories outline the ways we expect the assessment to improve student learning, which should be the primary purpose of assessment. From the teacher's point of view we can also have secondary purposes: to provide diagnostic information to the teacher both about how well the class understands the topics and of students' individual understanding.

In order to obtain feedback on the experience of using a continuous evaluation we prepared a short survey for students to evaluate the experience. The results of the evaluation of the optative subject showed the satisfaction of the students with the methodology. From the lecturers’ point of view, we think that this method has contributed positively to learning and motivation.

Keywords:

Continuous assessment, Higher Education, building engineering.