Abstract:

In the new framework of the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE), it’s crucial to provide the students with the required competences and skills of their future professional area. It’s important to remark that not only specific skills, but transversal ones must be considered during the learning process. Traditionally, the autonomous learning of the students has played a minor role, despite of being a basic skill in the formation of the future professionals. In this work, we present and analyze several actions aimed to the motivation of the competence of the autonomous learning. The study has been developed in six different graduate and undergraduate courses (Architecture, Industrial Engineering, Agronomic Engineering, Technical Industrial Engineering, Technical Computer Engineering and Prevention of Labour Risks Master), at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Valencia, Spain). As part of this study, the following actions were analyzed: case method, project based learning, action tutorial of orientation and follow-up, briefcase and formative evaluation. The groups of students that participated in the actions were heterogeneous, in terms of academic course and number of students in each group. For each action, a set of indicators were defined in order to evaluate the results of the study. Those indicators were based in the number of reports presented by the students and their quality, as well as in survey studies, and in the number of tutoring sessions per student and the qualifications obtained. In general terms, a clear improvement has been observed in these indicators. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that the actions used in this work are effective for the formation and evaluation of the competences.

Keywords:

transversal skills, autonomous learning, formative evaluation.