AN EDUCATIONAL ONLINE TOOL FOR THE INITIAL ASSESSMENT OF SKILLS NEEDED FOR THE FINAL-YEAR PROJECT

With the implementation of the European Higher Education System (EHES) education in the European Union states has dramatically changed. Modifications in the training model arise from the need to train professionals that are able to solve problems of their professional field independently. In this sense the new training programmes have to provide undergraduate students with the opportunities to develop abilities that are adequate and necessary for the job market (European Commission, 2003). All these changes represent a challenge for lecturers from the higher education both at an instrumental and at a methodological level.

One of the main novelties of the EHES within the Spanish educational system is that all students need to elaborate an undergraduate dissertation in order to obtain the degree title. Conversely, before the EHES final-year projects were only requested in technical degrees (Vilardell Riera, 2010). For this reason in the majority of university degrees the experience in tutoring final-year projects is still sparse and there are many unknowns with respect to the tutoring process.

During the final-year project the students have to show an integrated control of abilities acquired throughout their degree studies. In particular, it is expected that they have to be able to manage, organize and interpret relevant information of the field they have chosen to research on and, at the same time, they have to be able to produce judgments, arguments and to reflect on the chosen subject of the final-year project. To achieve these goals, students normally receive tuition from a tutor that has to guide, advise and plan training activities for them (Priego, Moraleda, Guerrero, & Guerrero, 2012). To be able to plan the training activities, the tutor needs to know at the beginning of the tuition process what is the student’s level of skill in different aspects needed for elaborating the undergraduate dissertations. Considering lecturers’ current workload we believe it would be convenient for tutors to have an evaluation tool that allows them to rapidly and accurately assess the key abilities that students already master and their training needs in order to be successful in elaborating the final-year project dissertation.

In this work we propose an online tool that aims at facilitating tutors when providing tuition of final-year projects. This tool is designed to evaluate students’ abilities such as databases information searching, using referencing style, using English for academic purposes, writing academic texts, using software for editing documents and for presentations, making oral presentations and planning skills. To conclude we consider that this innovative assessment tool will help lecturers during the tutoring process of the final-year project in different degrees.