Abstract:

With the aim of enhancing transversal competences and skills, several learning activities to work in groups of students have been included in the physics subject of first year engineering degrees at the School of Design Engineering of Universitat Politècnica de València. The idea of these activities is working in transversal competences, such as collaborative teamwork, mastery of language, critical thinking ... at the same time than learning physics.

After carrying out a pilot experience on this, we tried to study the students’ perception about the collaborative teamwork activities done by means of a survey. We have recently published the description of the survey and a first analysis, concluding that it seems there is a certain distrust of the students to the proposed activities. In order to better understand the situation, and see if the results can be generalised to other situations a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) study has been performed.

CFA is particularly useful in the validation of scales for measuring specific constructs. Based on structural equation modelling, CFA allows a deeper understanding of the basis of the survey. In this paper we introduce CFA techniques in the study in order to set a well established factored model with validated scale from which to quantify the various factors obtained. In this way, we can track the activity, enhancing the diagnosis capacity and improving the performance.

Keywords:

Collaborative work, statistical validation.