Abstract:

The establishment of the European Convergence Plan on higher education in Spain involves the adaptation of our national legislation and institutions to the new framework of the law. In a European Higher Education Area the quality evaluation of their programs and the teaching staff level are some of the most important elements to ensure universities capacity to reach the compromises with society. Convinced that the establishment of the European area of higher education requires constant support, supervision and adaptation to the continuously evolving needs, it has been founded national institutions like ANECA (Agencia Nacional de Evaluación de la Calidad y Acreditación) a governmental institution which objective is to help towards the quality improvement of the High Educational Spanish System due to the evaluation, certification and accreditation of teaching methods, teachers and institutions.
In order to ensure the teachers professional competence and educational programs quality has been created a Teaching Performance Assessment Program which is DOCENTIA. With this program, based on ANECA guidelines, the university examines teaching staff quality. The objectives of the DOCENTIA program are the identification, diffusion and consideration of the good teaching practices and to promote the accreditation of teachers by the national evaluation agencies like ANECA.

In Complutense University of Madrid DOCENTIA program assess teachers on the basis of three main subject parameters: planning, development and results. With regard to planning, teachers should plan, organize and coordinate coherently the teaching. Development means to assure that the all planned objectives have been carried out. Results involve the successful achievement of the learning process. The evaluation is done due to reports and surveys filled out by teachers and students, respectively.

The establishment of this program is still in experimental stage being submitted to several improvements accepted by the university community. At this moment this evaluation of a voluntary nature has been warmly welcomed instead of that there have noticed some fears and skeptical attitudes related to the increase of work for teachers and the possible subjective interpretation for the global evaluation. This assessment teaching by writing survey questions should be using with a simple language to avoid producing biased data and misinterpretation.

University community is fully convinced that this kind of programs will contribute towards a better quality teaching.