Abstract:

In the last decade, a great number of experiences on pedagogical models focused in the learning process has been carried out, promoted by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the important challenges proposed by the new generations of students. Such models involve a wide variety of activities for learning and assessment purposes, but in many cases the student is not aware of the relationship between the learning activities and the final evaluation. This fact decreases the motivation and the work level of the student, worsening the learning process.

From this point of view, the designing of alternative evaluation procedures must be centered in some respects:
(i) the evaluation must be a learning tool;
(ii) focused in the acquisition of competences;
(iii) with clear criteria known in advance by the student;
(iv) with immediate feedback about lacks and errors and suggestions to improve;
(v) including tools allowing the students self-grade their learning process;
(vi) and providing to the teacher continuous information about student’s advances.

Rubrics are a very useful tool to these respects quite spread in many countries, as United States, Finland or United Kingdom. As occurs for any assessment procedure, rubrics must be defined to be objective, coherent with the competences to be acquired by the student and low time-consuming for the teacher. However, the creation of quality rubrics which satisfy these requirements is a very complex task, because they are dependent on the subject, level and context of application and usually they consist on non-quantitative measurements based in observations and perception of the evaluator which must be introduced one by one in a sort of table.

In the present work, financed by the Program for Promoting Teaching Innovation (PIIDUZ_17_299), rubrics have been designed for the subject of Engineering Thermodynamics of second course of the Degree in Industrial Technologies Engineering at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). The criteria are the particular skills related to the competences to be acquired in the subject; four levels of performance are defined as in-process, basic, intermediate and advanced; descriptors are a specific text for each level and criteria, which describe what the student must know to do in each case, being a cumulative learning.

The main novelty of the work is that the assessment process with rubrics is quantitative and automated. Each criteria and level is related to certain questions and calculations accomplished by the students in the evaluation activities of the subject. The quantitative information, stored in Moodle forms, is downloaded in a spreadsheet and later processed. The methodology followed in the present academic course is here presented.

Keywords:

Rubrics, Moodle, Engineering, Higher Education, Teaching Innovation, Educational Assessment.