AN ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENT FOR THE “ANALYSIS AND PROBLEM SOLVING” COMPETENCE: CONTEXT AND RESULTS

In the last years, there is an increasing interest in the manner that transversal competences (TC) are introduced in the curricula. Transversal competences are generic and relevant skills that students have to develop through the several stages of the educational degrees. This paper explain the context of TC in Higher Studies at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in Spain, where several working groups have been established in the last three years in order to improve the way both Technical Schools and lecturers/professors teach and assess the degree of development of TC in students. The UPV has promoted to grant various innovative educational projects that contribute to improve the assessment and collection of evidences on TC. This paper emerges from the work developed in one of these innovative educational projects and, specifically, presents the experience related to the assessment of the “analysis and problem solving” TC. The main aim of this paper is to examine the assessment of analysis and problem solving in the context of postgraduate programmes at the UPV and, according to them to develop and apply an assessment instrument. The developed assessment instrument comprises the relevant indicators to assess the student’s degree of competence. It has been applied to evaluate the assignments of students in the course named “Production planning and scheduling in distributed environments”, which belongs to the Master in Advanced Engineering Production, Logistics and Supply Chain at the UPV. This paper presents both the educational experience and main results obtained.