Abstract:

The development of transferable skills should be progressively included in higher education degrees. One of the problems of practicing these skills is the necessity to plan them as part of the student’s homework. We have evaluated the possibilities that screencasts offer as a way to develop transferable skills such as searching, contrasting and synthesizing information, collaborative work, oral communication, providing constructive criticism, overseeing other’s work and at the same time analyzing real problems regarding the future career of the students. One of the advantages of this system is that the student’s work can be reviewed and evaluated offline, enabling self and peer evaluation. This tool has been analyzed with 4th year students of Biomedical Engineering at Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain). The students had to create a screencast reviewing the ethical implications of a certain science or technology related with biomedicine in groups of 3-4 people. They also had to provide a global evaluation of their own whole screencast and an evaluation of the contribution of each member of the group, including themselves. On the other hand, the students had to evaluate the screencast of 4 other groups. Finally, the teacher also evaluated the screencast as a whole. A scoring rubric was used to facilitate self and peer evaluation and to define expectations of the task. Self-evaluation of the student’s own work was highly correlated with the self-evaluation of the whole screencast (R2=0.68). Lower correlation values were obtained between self-evaluation and the evaluation provided by the rest of the members of the group (R2=0.53). In this case, the marks awarded by the rest of the group were usually lower. In general, the students were more demanding than the teacher, especially when they were evaluating the work of other groups. A high correlation was obtained between the teacher evaluation and the group self-evaluation (R2=0.65) and between the teacher and the peer evaluation (R2=0.77). The benefits of screencast as a tool for practicing transferable skills and the limitations and difficulties of its evaluation are discussed.

Keywords:

Self evaluation, peer evaluation, scoring rubric.