Abstract:

Even having designed an academic program based on competencies, when students finish this program they are usually not aware of their competency development. A competent person is the one who proves to have the necessary capacity, knowledge, skill or experience to perform a successful task within a specific area. In this sense, educating and training for the development of competencies means generating the necessary conditions for an integrated mobilization of knowledge, personal resources and mental and psychomotor processes to be used in response to the demands of the real world. In a virtual environment of teaching and learning, this reflection on competency development can even be more complex because of its own characteristics (asynchronous and based on written communication). It is in this framework that the following research is presented.

Assessment is at the center of every curriculum designed by competencies. A competency-based assessment requires focusing on the evolution of students’ competencies, measuring their performance and providing individual feedback to help them progress in their learning process.

For this reason assessment should meet three key elements:
1) a model of continuous and formative assessment,
2) a variety of assessing agents (teachers, students, etc.), and,
3) a return or feedback.

This research focuses on the latter element. Feedback is understood as the information to know what strategies or changes students need to implement to improve their assignments. In this sense, feedback is conceptualised as feedforward: it aims to improve learning. This study pretends to analyse the impact and effect of feedback in students’ competency development in an open university. This is done by studying the perception of participants in a Master’s degree final project (the final subject of the Program where the competency development should be more obvious and clear).

In the Educational Psychology Master’s degree program, at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the elaboration of the final project is being done by the completion of five different learning assignments that contribute to the final product. Each one of these assignments work for the development of specific competencies defined by learning outcomes following the Bloom’s Taxonomy classification. Once the learning assignment is done teacher provides a regular and individual feedback to the student through an assessment report. From here students have to implement this feedback in the following assignment making the modifications and changes set by the teacher.

For this research, and in order to explore to what extent feedback contributes to students’ competency development, a quantitative methodology has been proposed using a series of questionnaires in order to collect information on two aspects:
a) students’ self-reflection on their competency development,
b) students’ implementation of teachers’ feedback . Specifically four types of questionnaires have been designed: a pre-test survey, a series of four tracking questionnaires after each feedback, a post-test survey and a teachers’ perception final questionnaire.

This paper presents the results of the pre-test survey (n=127) that has been conducted to not only identify which competencies students perceive to have acquired during the Master's’ degree, but especially, to establish which feedback they would like to receive in the future in order to improve them.

Keywords:

Feedback, competency-based learning, feedback, higher education, students’ perception.