Abstract:

One of the main novelties of the European Higher Education System (EHES) within the Spanish educational system is that all students need to elaborate a final-year project in order to obtain the degree title. This new academic task is aimed to assess degree-specific abilities as well as other transversal skills such as database information searching, using referencing style, using English for academic purposes, writing academic texts, using software for editing documents and for making presentations, making oral presentations and planning skills, among others. The purpose of the current study was to analyze the perception of a group of final year undergraduate students from the University of Granada in Spain regarding their level of mastery in different skills needed for the final-year project. The sample comprised 91 students aged 20 to 31 years old (M=22.49, SD=1.97) who were enrolled in the fourth year of health sciences (B.S. Speech and Language Therapy) and social sciences (B.S. Psychology and B.A. Teacher of Childhood Education degrees). Preliminary results show that the majority of the participants consider themselves skillful in referencing the cited literature according to the referencing style in their degrees, in writing academic texts and in planning for their final-year project. However, a relevant percentage of the participants (41.8%) stated they only dominate searching for information in Spanish to a little extent, and almost the majority of the participants (74.8%) considered they have very little skill or no skill at all in searching for information in English. Furthermore more than a half of the participants consider they have very little skill (41.8%) or no skill at all (15.4%) in understanding academic texts that are written in English. Also a considerable percentage of the participants (43%) consider they have very little skill or have no skill at all in making oral presentations. Finally, the majority of the participants (92.3%) consider they are not skillful or have very little skill in using reference management software. As a conclusion, final year students need to receive more training and support so they can feel more confident when searching for information both in Spanish and in English, using reference management softwares and in making oral presentations. Furthermore it is necessary to improve students’ ability to better understand English written academic texts. For future research it would also be interesting to extend the present study to other degrees (e.g. Technical degrees) where the final year project has been established decades ago.

Keywords:

Final-year project, basic academic skills, evaluation and assessment of student learning.