Abstract:

Student outcomes describe what students are expected to know and be able to do by the time of graduation. These relate to the knowledge, skills, and behaviours that students acquire as they progress through the program. One of the most repeated student outcomes in different accreditation systems (i.e. European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education, Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Spanish National Agency for the Quality Evaluation and Accreditation) is effective communication, or the ability to communicate effectively. To certify the attainment of student outcomes the Universities have put a big effort in carrying out different processes to identify, collect, and evaluate evidences of achievement. However, the same efforts have not always been put in providing activities to help the students to develop this common but really complex outcome. In this context, the goal of this work is to review the essential skills needed to communicate effectively and propose different self-learning activities to develop them. For that purpose, rubrics to assess the outcome proficiency developed by different institutions have been collected and analysed. From those rubrics, six main areas of proficiency have been identified: personal disposition towards communication, selection of quality content, structure of the exposition, verbal language, non-verbal language and presentation tools. Finally, for each of these areas, different activities to improve the proficiency of this piece of the outcome have been proposed.

Keywords:

Student outcomes, effective communication, activities, self-study.