COORDINATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSVERSAL COMPETENCES IN THE DEGREE OF FOOD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The integration of the Spanish University system in the European Higher Education Area established as one of the general principles for the design of the degrees that "the organization of teaching should be made under the aim of adapting the methods of teaching and learning to the acquisition of competences by students.” And it specifies that "it should emphasize methods of learning these competences, as well as the procedures to evaluate their acquisition."

The main objective of this work was to promote coordination between professors from different subjects of the four courses of the degree of Food Science and Technology, with the aim of facilitate the gradual acquisition of various generic and transversal competences. To achieve this overall objective the following partial objectives were proposed: implementation of different teaching methods on the development of certain generic skills such as oral communication skills and written in Spanish and English (G1), capacity for effective problem solving (G3) and working in group (G8). To establish a system for evaluating the competences acquired; measure the extent to which students have acquired these competences throughout the four degree courses and propose improvement actions to be implemented.

Some specific actions were implemented, in certain subjects in order to promote a fluency use of other languages so as to improve written expressions. Some of these activities were "creating advertising slogans in English", vocabulary activities such as "English glossary about different topics", and made summaries of different reports in English. The development of the skill "effective problem solving" was carried out by implementing activities in which the students must provide solutions to the data that they may have generated during their laboratory practices or collected from literature, or also provided by the professor. In the latter cases the use of bibliographical sources is encouraged. The activity "logbook or journal group" was implemented in those subjects in which the competence “working in group” was assigned. The results obtained showed that this activity contributed to "improve the efficiency of the training activities that had already been developed in order to help the students to develop the competence “working in group ". All the evaluation processes were carried out through rubrics elaborated by the professor and given to the student. And all the processes of implementation and evaluation were conducted by professors throughout the four academic year of degree. Work in a coordinated manner along different courses and different degree subjects, improves the acquisition of competences.