EVALUATION OF UNIVERSITY TUTORIAL PLAN

Between the divers actions designed to the challenge of the implementation of the Degrees adapted to the European High Education Area, the University of Burgos (UBU) has developed a Tutorial Plan Action (TPA) that takes into account different orientation modalities to their students. One of them is the tutorship of academic itinerary, whose objectives are to improve the capacity of the students to understand what and how they are learning, to review, to plan and to adopt responsible attitudes on their own learning capacities, and to orient them, with the aid of the services offered by our University, in their personal, academic and professional development. In the first course of application only some Degrees implanted the TPA, generalizing them in course 2010/11, so that all the new students in the UBU have had a professor tutor that will accompany them along their entire academic studies. The authors of this paper constituted a Grupo Innovación Docente University Tutorship (GIDUT) of the UBU, and during course 2009/10 they developed the first activity related to the TPA “A support guide for the tutors”, with the aim of being a useful support to professors in their tutorial action of academic itinerary. Another research developed by GIDUT has been the study on the attendant and the evaluation of the TPA. To display the results of that work is the target of this communication. In this study the impact of the tutorial action has been analyzed applying it to three Degrees of the UBU that began in academic course 2009/10: Degree in Science and Food Technology (SFT), Degree in Political Science and Public Management (PSPM) and Degree in Chemistry. The followed methodology has consisted on comparing the academic results obtained by the students in first course of Degree during course 2009/10 with the results of an historical one of 5 years of the honours degrees from which they came. For it, and from the academic registries, the following data have been elaborated: Abandonment; Rate of yield; Rate of success; and Categorization of the information of tutors and students according to a rubric. For the evaluation of the information that the tutor presents throughout the academic course, we have elaborated a rubric, considering the three following categories: Grade of satisfaction of the tutor with the tutorial action: Grade of implication of the student and Grade of implication of the tutor. In each one of them the ratios have showed: attitude/responsibility and procedure/tasks with 50% of weigh in each category. At last a statistical analysis has been made, as quantitative as much qualitative. Of the results obtained in this study it is deduced, among others, that when comparing these degrees with the 5 previous years of the honours degrees from which they came, the parameters that measure the academic performance of the students in the Degree in SFT seem to have improved with the implementation of the factors of Innovation; in the Degree in PSPM the abandonment has only decreased and in the Degree in Chemistry the averages of the three analyzed variables do not show significant differences with the implementation of the innovation factors. In conclusion, is necessary to continue studying the evolution of the TPA in successive academic courses, in order to: 1) to verify if the results obtained are real according the future academic courses; 2) to identify possible indicators of evaluation more depurated; and 3) to propose improvement actions.