Abstract:

According to the regulations on the Organisation and Assessment of Final Project Subjects (TFE) in Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in most Spanish universities, three main characteristics of TFEs can be established:
(a) they are a project oriented towards the development of a research or intervention where the competences acquired during the learning period are assessed;
(b) it is a personal work, involving active performance;
(c) it has academic assessment as a means of facilitating the development of competences.

Despite the normative development, as well as the freedom in the establishment of assessment criteria, Fuertes-Camacho et al. (2012) find that the self-assessment process has interesting effects on student motivation. Positive expectations in relation to self-efficacy are one of the elements that most guarantee academic success. Thus, by allowing students to participate in their evaluation, the feedback process is initiated which will lead to improvements in learning. This has to be done together with the tutor (Álvarez-Fernández and Pascual-González, 2012). In this sense, Jato et al. (2018) consider that much of the perceived value of KETs lies in providing a different learning experience, through which students learn to take responsibility for achieving their own goals. In this way, the existence of a protocol for guidance in carrying out the TFG is an ideal tool for the control of the development itself, as well as for carrying out the appropriate corrective measures to channel the work if there are differences with respect to what was programmed.

Given the importance and relevance of control in learning processes, and the characteristics of the development of a TFG, the main objective of this innovative teaching project is the development of a protocol for carrying out the TFG with the intention of guiding students towards the development of research work. The aim is not only to increase the student's knowledge, but also to find out how KETs contribute to the development of skills and abilities after their development. The design of this protocol consists of three successive stages. The initial stage is based on the profiling and narrowing down of the chosen topic in the student's chosen field of study, together with the identification of the most relevant information in the selected body of documents. It then continues with the development of appropriate keyword search formulae and their Boolean combination to identify papers that fit the chosen topic. The final stage deals with the validation of the application of personal filters according to the criteria based on previously acquired knowledge to improve the fit in the selection of documents to be included in the study and the elaboration of a list of performance or scientific productivity indicators together with their corresponding calculations.

Keywords:

Academic protocol, Final Project, high education, Spanish universities.