THE USE OF PEER-ASSESSMENT TO IMPROVE THE EVALUATION OF GENERIC COMPETENCES IN SUBJECTS RELATED TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

The use of peer-assessment to evaluate specific competences in subjects within Bachelor or Master degrees has been widely studied in the literature. There are many references that claim the advantages of this methodology, such as: the improvement of the student's motivation; the assessment becomes part of the learning process, so that errors are seen as opportunities rather than mistakes; it implies the use of generic competences by the students and promotes their lifelong self-learning skills. However, the use of peer-assessment to evaluate generic competences has been comparatively less studied. There can be found some references dealing with the use of this methodology for the evaluation of some instrumental generic competences such as team work or communication skills, for instance. But there are few references for many other cognitive competences such as problem-solving skills or practical thinking, as far as the authors are aware.

In this work, a methodology for the assessment of some generic competences in subjects related to mechanical engineering is developed. This methodology is based on the combination of the assessment of the teachers together with peer-assessment. The way the students evaluate their colleagues, and the comparison with the teachers evaluation, gives an interesting insight to know if they have acquired the generic competences properly and to what extent. Moreover, all the advantages mentioned before can be found in this methodology, so that the students can improve their learning process by evaluating their class mates.

Two experiences in the use of this approach are described. First, one experience carried out during the past two years in a subject related to Multibody Dynamics within the last year of the Bachelor Degree in Industrial Technologies Engineering. The competences on problem-solving skills and capacity to apply knowledge into practice have been evaluated by using checklists. These evaluation tools are not as accurate as rubrics can be, but they can be useful as a guideline for the students, and they are more easy to use for the markers. The second one has been developed in a Vibration Analysis course that belongs to the Master’s Degree in Maintenance Engineering. This experience consists of the accomplishment of an academic work and its subsequent peer-assessment. The project is done in order to train the “report writing” and the “understanding and integration” skills together with the specific learning outcomes of the course. This work is co-assessed by the instructor of the course and by some other students not belonging to the group.

The objective of this experience is to improve the understanding of the course by involving the students in the assessment of their colleagues’ works.

Finally, some conclusions are derived from these experiences in order to improve the assessment process in the future.