Abstract:

The ‘Servicio Social’ (SS), literally ‘social service’, is the guided, supervised, and assessed internship Mexican students are required to complete before graduation and that enables them to give back to society for the education they received, contributing at the same time to the development of skills and competences in real scenarios (MEFI, 2012).

The purpose of this study is to analyze how the SS contributes to the Graduate Profile (GP) and the development of several generic and disciplinary skills in undergraduate psychology students from a public university in Yucatan, Mexico.

The GP, according to the Royal Spanish Academy, can be defined as ‘the set of distinctive features that characterizes someone or something’. This allows to establish the essential elements a graduate student must have in order to grow properly within the society and give back to it.

The GP in higher education states that the graduate student has the relevant cognitive, ethical and attitudinal competences to deploy her skills in a dynamic environment of ‘distributed knowledge’.

This University aims to honor its social commitment through its principles of quality and pertinence as stated by the UNESCO, where the students’ comprehensive development is key through six axes: learning-centered education, competences, social responsibility, innovation, flexibility and internationalization, as well as the commitment of considering practices in the curriculum that encourage graduate students to become members of the society with a proactive and responsible attitude in their social, professional, and personal facets (UNESCO, 2005).

Following a cross-sectional descriptive design, 70 undergraduate psychology students from projects belonging to the social, clinical, industrial or educational areas were assessed from January to July and August to December. Two instruments were used in the assessment: 1) the ‘Self-perceived Evaluation of the UCS provider about the GP’, and 2) the ‘Receiving Unit Evaluation of the perceived GP of the SS provider’; the degree of experience acquired in the SS was also assessed in both measures. The first evaluation sought to know the student’s self-perception on how much the functions she performed in the SS help to develop the GP. The second evaluation is the description of the activities carried out and the extent to which she completed them according to the receiving unit’s supervisor. The information was then analyzed to see if there was a match between the provided information and the GP proposed by the school. The assessed aspects were: knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Statistical analyses for the answers in the measures were carried out, and the report of results provided feedback to the existing curriculum.

Results showed that the SS providers comply with the GP in the categories of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, exhibiting important differences in the topics of knowledge among the four areas, which can be understood since the SSs are differentiated between each area.

The SS adequately meets the GP proposed by the school of psychology of that university, generating the necessary competences for a comprehensive development.

Keywords:

Graduate profile, internship (SS), impact assessment.