Abstract:

The European Higher Education Framework makes mandatory the teaching of practical skills to university students at all competence levels. This implies a review of the traditional teaching methodologies and the adoption of active ones where the student plays the main role in the teaching-learning process. This methodology allows students to develop their owns skills and makes them conscious of their knowledge about an specific topic.

As it is well known, problem resolution skills in Engineering are traditionally developped by taking notes from already solved problems in books or by the academic staff. We have found several weaknesses in this approach: first of all, it results a passive methodology where the average student is not really concious about his own progress or his skills for solving similar problems. Moreover, we have noticed that even if the student is able to solve a proposed problem, it is used that he finds difficulties to explain clearly what he has done and why. This means that although the student has achieved the objective of solving certain kind of problems, he has not developped the desired skills.

In this work we present a case study where we integrate a summative and formative assesment and a Problem Based Learning method (PBL) to a second year Electrical Engineering students group. The applied methodology can be summarized as presenting the students not the procedure to solve a particular kind of problems but a general estrategy to solve them. Then, they have to collaborate in groups to solve a never seen before exercise and explain it to its partners. An specific rating scale has been developped to evaluate all involved skills. This way we are able to carry on a detailed competence evaluation. We found that students achieved to solve the proposed problems successfully, they were able to suggest new ones and their motivation and general knowledge improved significantly.

Keywords:

Summative Assesment, Formative Assesment, Problem Resolution Skills.