Abstract:

The reorganisation of university education within the European Higher Education Area is aimed at promoting not only structural change but also a change in teaching methods, to focus on the skills that students should acquire as part of the learning process.

To schedule and develop an academic and vocational syllabus, and to achieve the fundamental goals of university education in the current context, our efforts should be directed at designing new strategies leading, on the one hand, to the acquisition of cognitive, procedural and attitudinal skills, and on the other, to a correct assessment of whether these goals have been achieved and to what extent. The evaluation process, thus, acquires a new dimension, one that should now be the object of reflection, study and improvement.

In the new scenario in which university education is being developed, such an evaluation must provide more than an objective assessment of skills acquisition; it should be integrated into the students’ learning process. It is therefore necessary to develop, implement and evaluate new techniques and instruments and count on the involvement of new actors in this field.

This study is intended to provide the teaching-learning process of university statistic courses in University of Granada (Spain), with a skills assessment system that is coherent and integrated with the other instructive-training elements in the course, which can be accepted by the students as part of their learning process, and which is recognised as such from the outset.

Specifically, our aim is to:

• Identify the individual skills constituting the subjects goals.
• Design a learning process leading to the acquisition of skills, based on tasks, teaching methods, selection of study scenarios and work plan.
• Develop an assessment system that is coherent with the teaching methods and work plan adopted, establishing criteria and scheduling, selecting techniques and creating assessment tools.
• Develop a weighting system for the final academic mark.
• Evaluate the experience, rating the final academic results achieved, studying the level of association between the assessments of each of the various training tasks, the degree of student satisfaction regarding the assessment process, the students’ involvement in this process, and its ultimate impact on the skills acquisition process.

Keywords:

European Higher Education Area, Skills assessment, Teaching-learning process of university statistic.