Abstract:

“Critical thinking competency” is a general competence and it is one of the competences that university students have to achieve during their academic training. For that reason, it has to be worked during university studies in order to enhance transfer knowledge between university, everyday life and working life. So, due to the development of this competence, students learn to be critical with their arguments and also about their classmate’s arguments.

A very good way to acquire critical thinking competency is to involve them in an assessment process using co-evaluation. In this way, we can encourage students "critical analysis", increasing their autonomy and improving learning. In order to get these abilities, it is necessary a very good coordination between teachers, so it is important to foster interdisciplinarity among different degree modules in order to optimize and encourage meaningful learning.

In this paper, we report the result of an interdisciplinary work carrying out with 3rd year students of the Degree in Physical Activity and Sport Science. All the students were registered on the degree courses of “Physical Activity and Health” and “Teaching in Physical Activity and Sport I”. Proactive methodological assessment and participative assessment activities came to an end in an oral presentation.

The aim of the study was to analyse the results obtained in a co-evaluation realized just after an oral presentation. 88 students of 3th course of the degree in Physical Activity and Sport Science participated in the study. Students had to assess their classmates after an oral presentation of an interdisciplinary and formative task. The task was developed in groups of eight, so eleven tasks were presented.

In order to collect the data, an evaluation instrument of ordinal classification, was used. The evaluation instrument was design ad hoc, with a Likert scale graded from 1 to 4: 1 inadecuate, 2 poor, 3 adecuate, 4 very good. The students were informed about the study, and also, were instructed on how to complete the assessment instrument. Furthermore, the students were informed that their opinions do not affect their subjects’ marks.
The results were analysed with SPSS v.19 program. Results show that most of the items observed by students regarding their classmates get scores between adequate and very good. Contextualization (92%), relevant (88,5%),content (87.2%), consistency (82.3%) and clear explanation (84.7%) were the items that students score like adequate and very good; however, students score as poor or inadequate the following items: Originality(31%), Power point presentation (25.4%), appropriate responsiveness to the questions (22.4%) and adapted to differing (22.2%).

Taking into account the findings, it could be necessary to investigate and think about the reason because the students are more critical on aspects that are not related with technical content like originality, Power point presentation, and appropriate responsiveness to the questions. It could be due to students are not used to this kind of formative task and to participate in co- evaluation activities.

It could be necessary to enhance this kind of activities in an interdisciplinary way in order to get autonomy, responsibility and critical thinking significantly.

Keywords:

General competence, co-evaluation, interdisciplinary, critical thinking.