Abstract:

One challenge in higher education is how to ensure the acquirement of soft competencies such as the ability to collaborate, communicate, negotiate and lead a team, among others. By contrast to hard competences that are measurable and usually acquired through formal education and training programs, many innovative learning tools and immersive practices have been proposed for the students to acquire specific soft skills. Project-based learning (PBL) is one of those student-centred tools that involves dynamic teamwork. Nevertheless, teamwork management typically causes serious problems such as unbalanced task distribution, unique assessment for all the participants, frustration, invisible work… Likewise, instructors should be trained for successfully conducting this practice and fairly assessing each student´s work.

This work is aimed at proposing a tool that enables the fair assessment of teamwork when the PBL methodology is on practice. It combines three specific evaluation systems and it has been designed for being implemented in two subjects focused on the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) that are delivered in the Alava Campus of the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU.

The courses comprise a theoretical basis on the matter, individual learning activities, and a collaborative project based on PBL methodology. In the latter, the students are shared out in work teams and conducted for carrying out the environmental impact assessment report (EIAR) of a project. The EIAR pursues the comprehensive evaluation of the likely effects of a project that significantly affect the environment by assessing the impact on a wide range of factors (biodiversity, land, soil, health, water, climate, population….). It must include the description of the project, potential significant effects, reasonable alternatives, and measures to avoid, prevent, reduce or offset likely significant impacts on the environment, among others.

The EIAR project execution requires the team to face difficulties and challenges during the process, enforcing the soft competences. One important concern during and after the completion of the tasks is the fair assessment of each participant. The evaluation tool proposed in this work is divided into three categories:
1- the individual contribution of each student will be assessed by a specific software developed by our group;
2- the technical quality of the report will be assessed by a rubric, rendering an equal score for all the participants;
3- each student will assess his/her own contribution, the other teammates´ work and the overall execution of the project.

The careful design of this tool that will be implemented next semester will let instructors adjust the score of each teammate according to his/her fair contribution and individual acquirement of soft competences. It will also contribute to avoid or mitigate underestimation of devoted students when scoring all members with a single grade associated with the final report.

Keywords:

Project-based learning, assessment of collaborative projects, evaluation tool, automatic assessment, environmental impact assessment.