CONTINUOUS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY EVALUATION OF ‘METHODS IN OCEANOGRAPHY’, A COURSE IN THE GRADE OF MARINE SCIENCES AT CADIZ UNIVERSITY

The new European higher education system has forced a serious review of undergraduate and graduate teaching programs in Spain as well as in other EU countries. This review has resulted in several changes, not only in the structure of higher education in Spain, but also in the teaching methodologies. For instance, new teaching methods involve a more active participation of students in their learning process. These new approaches result moderately efficient and satisfactory. Some of the most extensively used are: class discussions, group projects, oral or poster presentations, problem-based learning, or quiz methodology. The aim is always to develop a certain universal skills that should be required in the labour market. Nevertheless the introduction of these interacting methodologies led to new problems related to the student’s evaluation. From this new perspective, assessing the knowledge of students must be completed with evaluation of new skills and roles acquired as leadership, teamwork, communication, adaptability, creativity, problem-solving, ability to work with little or no supervision, etc. In addition, the new degrees include many multidisciplinary courses involving different departments, enable making even more difficult the evaluation process.

‘Methods in Oceanography’ is a field and laboratory course in analytical tools of oceanography. This course is taught in the fourth semester of the Degree in Marine Sciences at University of Cádiz (Spain) and shared by four different departments: Analytical Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Applied Physics and Biology. Although this subject was also included in the previous Bachelor program, it has experienced a significant reduction of teaching duties in the new Degree and, therefore new methodologies are absolutely required. Simultaneously new evaluation strategies must be implemented to calibrate the student’s effort and the skills developed. In this case, the main objective was to achieve an integrated evaluation, because the students must be able to integrate the knowledge from the different areas to solve real problems. Keeping this aim in mind, students were divided into small teams (five members each) and a specific research project was assigned to each one, related with the topics of the subject. The students’ task was to prepare a poster presentation in which they explain the sampling and analytical methodologies needed to carried out the research. Then, a poster session was organised, and students had to explain their work to their classmates and professors. The supervision and evaluation of different projects were performed multidisciplinary and interdepartmental regardless the specific topic of research proposed.

In this communication, we present our experiences in the integrated evaluation of the course ‘Methods in Oceanography’ in the Degree along its first year of teaching as well as new proposals for the forthcoming academic year.