Abstract:

At present, the curricular approach based on competences dominates the scenario of university teaching. As a consequence, the evaluation of competences must be implemented in the educational process. A great effort has been made to develop competence-based tools for assessment in the classroom framework but, as usual, the laboratory framework has been set aside, even if it has demonstrated a big potential as learning-environment in the scientific and technological disciplines.

Inquiry based laboratory sessions escape from a classical approach to lab-sessions. They confer the opportunity of involving the student group in the lab session as if they were investigators. Thus, students play a leading role and all the competences are intensively worked. In this work we show that generic and specific competences can be easily assessed in inquiry based laboratory sessions and we propose a competence based evaluation of the laboratory sessions of a first year's Physics subject for engineers.

Keywords:

Competence, evaluation, inquiry based laboratory.