Abstract:

Due to the latest legislative changes on higher education in Spain and the labour market demands for current and following graduates, it will be necessary shortly to progressively include activities that allow to improve students' competences. Moreover, an assessment of these competences will be required, and the results will be added to the grades. New teaching experiences in undergraduate studies for improving competences and the receptiveness of students to these new activities have been studied in this work.
The students are enrolled in the subject "Industrial Chemical Processes" of the Degree in Industrial Technologies Engineering. In recent years, a series of difficulties have been observed regarding the understanding of problem statements, the description of industrial processes or the interpretation of the basic operation of processes, the management of the information needed to carry out complex calculations of industrial processes, in terms of the reliability of the sources, etc. The continuous assessment activities for problem solving and for the development of a complex teamwork assignment is considered very important. During these activities, the student must show some initiative and autonomy, but in general, students require excessive supervision to be able to carry out their work with a minimum of quality. The present study aims to improve both the transversal competences described above and the final marks for such teamwork assignment.
The main objective has been the improvement of different transversal competences such as oral and written communication, knowledge of foreign languages, information management and problem-solving, teamwork, and critical use of Internet as a source of rigorous information. The specific objectives have been to improve the marks of the final assignment of the subject, to evaluate some of these competences or to find out student satisfaction with this tool by means of a survey, among others.
In order to improve these transversal competences established as an objective, activities such as the following have been carried out in the problem sessions and during the tutoring of teamwork: exercises on equipment identification and graphic representation of processes, preparation of an initial report with basic information on the assigned industrial process, preparation of a help document to improve the format of the partial and final reports, tutoring to analyse the quality of the bibliographic sources chosen by the student. Critical analysis, encouraging the use of citations in English, evaluation of the number of references, oral presentation of the final work by all students and evaluation of the final work. Google Forms for student surveys and Trello (teamwork management) by some students have been used.
The results have been clearly satisfactory. Improvements have been observed in the way of working, in satisfaction or in the quality of the final work presented in specific aspects such as better initial orientation of the work, encouraging a certain mentality (not in all cases) of establishing a clear teamwork procedure, increasing the number of bibliographic citations, use of English references and scientific articles, critical analysis and comparison of the sources, providing information about the working procedures of the team, and improving the written and oral presentation of work.

Keywords:

Transversal competences, teamwork.