Abstract:

Training ethical responsibility, as well as other transferable skills, is becoming increasingly important in undergraduate studies. We recently started a pilot program using screencasts as a tool to train this skill with students of Bsc Biotechnology (4th year) and Bsc Biomedical Engineering (3rd year) at Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain). This methodology not only enabled the training of skills related to ethics, but also others such as searching, contrasting and synthesizing information, team working, oral communication, providing constructive criticism, overseeing other’s work and at the same time analyzing real problems regarding the students’ future career. In brief, the students were asked to analyze ethical issues that they may face as researchers in the future (Biotechnology) or ethical issues regarding a specific technology (Biomedical Engineering) and to present their work as a 15’-20’ documentary, providing a screencast, which would be self and peer assessed. Following assessment, students were surveyed in order to analyze their perception of the methodology and of self and peer evaluation. Despite the different educational contexts, the profile of the answers obtained was considerably similar in both degrees. In general, students agreed that the tool was valuable for their formation, and in a higher degree, they admitted that it helped them to arise doubts and to better understand the contents being assessed. One of the doubts that the teachers faced was if the students were objective during self and peer evaluation. The students mostly considered that their evaluation was unbiased. They recognized that self assessment, including a global score for the group and an individual score for each member, should be included in the assessment, not only to detect anomalies, but also as a recognition of their work. Regarding peer assessment, the students considered that it helped them to detect weak and strong points of their own contribution, as well as, to identify aspects that they had not previously considered. But one of the major points of agreement was that peer assessment was useful to be conscientious of the difficulty of assessing other people’s work.

Keywords:

Ethics, research, self assessment, peer assessment.