CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT TOOLS IN STATISTICS FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES: STUDENTS’ VIEWS ON THEIR USE IN LEARNING

The adoption of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by Spanish universities has meant deep changes in the teaching-learning process. Careful design and planning of the activities to be performed both in and outside the classroom are necessary, and this change in methodology brings continuous assessment to the fore.

The subject “Statistics for Social Sciences”, in the first year of the Labor Relations and Human Resources Degree of the University of Murcia (Spain), is quite difficult for students who have had little, if any, experience or training in quantitative methods. Thus, following the spirit of the EHEA, some activities for continuous assessment have been developed to enhance the teaching-learning process. Along with the final examination (60% of the final mark), other activities are now included: two multiple choice tests (7.5% each) - one halfway through the semester and the other at the end; a collaborative problem-solving task (7.5%); a group assignment on database use with Microsoft Excel (12.5%); and a seminar on relevant database sources (5%). These tools provide ongoing measurements of how students gain competences in the subject while providing feedback for teachers and students alike. They also serve to guide students in their learning and so favor a better final exam performance.

Students’ opinions of the tools used in this continuous assessment were obtained via a short, anonymous, on-line survey through the Virtual Classroom. Students score the usefulness of the four assessment tools in their learning on a five-point scale. The results show that students see all the tools as being important (mean greater than three) and that they consider the two multiple choice tests to be the most useful, and the seminar the least. Teachers have drawn on this information to improve the design of the assessment tools for future classes.