Abstract:

Teaching activities in engineering disciplines face important, and always changing challenges for training future professionals. Society demands engineers and technicians with transversal competences and able to integrate in multidisciplinary workgroups. Hence, there has been a tendency to evaluate the students of technical subjects based on workgroups methodologies. These methods allow the student to acquire skills needed for their future professional development, such as interpersonal communication, group problem resolution, leadership skills and time management. However, in undergraduate (and even master) degrees with a high number of enrolled students (up to 100-150 students per subject) makes both the division of work in groups and the fair an objective evaluation complex tasks with unresolved challenges. This situation prevents both the individual follow-up and the personal evaluation of the workgroup members, since the relation of tutoring hours-class hours-students is unfeasible.

Consequently, this paper presents a proposal for an objective evaluation methodology based on:
(1) the elaboration of work groups based on an initial questionnaire, so that the groups are organized according to the students's preference in each theme taking into account its previous knowledge and skills;
(2) the objective evaluation by teachers and students using the rubric method by means of qualitative and quantitative milestones, and the public presentation of each work; and
(3) the redistribution of the student's individual rating by the members of the group.

Therewith, the intention is to carry out a monitoring of the students to detect in time of lackadaisical behavior, as well as reward the effort made. In addition, this evaluation method seeks the heterogeneous formation of work groups to simulate the reality that students will face in their professional career. On the other hand, it is also intended to promote aspects of self-evaluation and peer evaluation, promoting honesty in the collaborative work and helping teachers with the final evaluation process.

Early results have indicated that it has been possible to detect and to correct cases of parasitism in several work groups, thanks to the redistribution of the student's individual rating. Furthermore, the rubric method implemented in the master subject “Dynamics of the environment, atmosphere, ocean and coast” shows satisfactory results for evaluating oral presentations.

Keywords:

Workgroups, rubric method, presentation, peer evaluation.