PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVE-LEARNING AND COLLABORATIVE METHODOLOGIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CROSS-CURRICULAR SKILLS DURING THE FINAL YEAR DISSERTATION

The Bologna process currently ongoing in the European Higher Education Area establishes the continuous assessment and the progressive improvement of curricular and cross-curricular skills. In this skill-acquisition process, Final Year Dissertation (FYD) must play a relevant role, especially with regard to the cross-curricular skills. In this context, a multidisciplinary group of lecturers from the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) is working on a project (2012-2014) based on the use of active methodologies to achieve the required cross-curricular skills in the FYD. This initiative is being tested in three Degrees at the same time: Human Nutrition and Dietetics, Food Science and Technology and Environmental Sciences. During 2012/2013 academic year a pilot test was performed with some students from the Degree of Human Nutrition and Dietetics.

The project included several activities to reinforce the acquisition of cross-curricular skills and to check it by using the corresponding evaluation rubrics.

This initiative has a strong cooperative component, with two main activities:
1) an online discussion-forum about the draft of each dissertation, where each student is asked to provide critics and suggestions to improve the proposal of her/his schoolmates and also each student receives comments about her/his own draft,
2) an oral presentation in front of the FYD partners, in the absence of the tutors, in order to receive contributions to improve it and also to make his/her own contributions to the presentations of the schoolmates.

In the first activity participation frequency and contributions made by student were evaluated. With regard to the second cooperative activity, students were asked to fill in a questionnaire with their contributions/suggestions which, afterwards, were evaluated.

After the pilot implementation of the project in 2012/13 year, results were analyzed. Although the overall evaluation was positive in many aspects, which are maintained in the 2103/14 actual implementation, some points needed to be improved. In general, the participation of the students in both activities was evaluated as poor, because quite superficial contributions were collected.

Thus, several measures have been taken including:
a) higher emphasis to make students get involved in the activities,
b) increased contribution of each cooperative activity in the final grade
c) apart from the rubrics, provide students with specific guidelines for each collaborative activity; these documents explain in detail what is required during their participation either in the forum and during the presentations.

This communication describes the deficiencies detected during the pilot implementation of a procedure based on active-learning and collaborative methodologies to improve the cross-curricular skill acquisition in the Final Year Dissertation. In the same way, corresponding adjustments are proposed to achieve a higher participation, a better understanding of the objectives and a more qualified performance of the students during 2013/14 year. Overall, this experience can be helpful for other lecturers implementing these kinds of activities aiming to develop cooperative skills.