ASSESSMENT OF INSTRUMENTAL SKILLS AND CAPACITY TO USE THE TECHNIQUES AND TOOLS IN PRACTICE WITHIN A SUBJECT RELATED TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

A competence-based approach is extensively followed in the university system within the frame of the European Higher Education Area. The generic competences are recognised to be critical for the professional development of the students and for the social prosperity as an overall purpose to be pursued. Therefore, academic institutions are conscious of the need to achieve an international accreditation of their competence-based programmes and have been working hard on this issue. The Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) has defined 13 main competences in the development of its Bachelors’ and Masters’ degrees. These competences are of great interest for employers to have better information of their candidates regarding not only the subjects that they have coursed but also what they are actually able to do. Also universities can take advantage of this information in order to promote students’ mobility based on comparable evaluation criteria.

Nevertheless, the assessment of the generic competences is still a topic under research. It is widely accepted that the lecture-based teaching method does not fit with the development of individual skills, thus, a change in the current pedagogical practices is strongly required. The use of learning-oriented active methodologies is, in the authors’ opinion, essential to force the students to put their skills into play by means of evaluation activities that permit to a direct evaluation of the required competences.

In this way, the authors propose an ‘outcomes’ approach for the assessment of the ability to use the techniques, skills and tools for engineering practice issues within a subject related to mechanical engineering. The practical part of the subject under study is divided in computer lab-work sessions that are described in detail. A systematic tool based on a questionnaire was proposed for the evaluation of the generic competence “Specific Instrumental”, as defined in our university, in one subject dealing with Machine Design.

The questionnaire was taken out of the exam and was distributed in the last session without any weight in the final grade in order to eliminate the pressure factor over the students. The set of questions were focused on the domain of Matlab© (the software used in the practical lessons) at three different levels in order to evaluate the knowledge acquired by the students. The questions were mainly oriented towards procedural methodologies to address the resolution of general or specific problems that were previously presented in class. Furthermore, it allowed for the evaluation of the degree of dexterity and understanding of the operability of the equipment used in the technical part of the lessons. Therefore, the work presented, analyses in detail, the preliminary obtained results using the developed evaluation tool in our department during the explained learning experience.