Abstract:

From 2010 onward, European universities have been immersed in the Bologna process, designing a common European Higher Education Area in which the quality of the education is based on the continuous assessment of students and a progressive improvement in the skills. Competences have been defined for every degree following a gradual pattern. This means that, regarding the skills, at the end of the degree students are asked to demonstrate the highest ability.

In this scenario, it is necessary to create tools to help students achieve these skills. Moreover, evaluation strategies must be designed in order to measure their improvements. In fact, there is a lack of these learning-evaluation tools together with little experience of most of the lecturers in this field. The University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has done a big effort to train lecturers in active-learning and collaborative methodologies and to encourage them to use these strategies as a systematic tool to guarantee the correct development of curricular and cross-curricular skills.

Nevertheless, there are some courses with singular characteristics in which these methodologies would require a huge coordination effort. This is the case of the Final Year Dissertation (FYD), a last year course, common to most of the degrees, in which students have to develop an autonomous and original written work, present and defend it in front of a tribunal. In each academic year several tutors are involved in this course.

In order to face this situation, a group of lecturers from the Faculty of Pharmacy of the UPV/EHU has just started working on a project (2012/2014) regarding FYD, supported by the University´s Educational Advice Service. The main goals of the initiative are: use of active methodologies and cross-curricular skills promotion in the FYD, development of a working procedure for monitoring and evaluation of the FYD and standardization of the methodology so that it can be implemented systematically at Faculty level. During the current academic year a trial is being performed with some students from the Degree of Human Nutrition and Dietetics.

A methodology has already been designed and is being tested, taking into account both, activities and evaluation. The key milestones have been, on the one hand, the proposal of a real context linked to the topic predefined by each student for his/her FYD; and, on the other hand, two collaborative activities among students: an online discussion about the contents and structure of the dissertation and an oral presentation). All the details and protocols for the activities have been made available and rubrics for evaluating each activity have been shown to the students so that they have known, beforehand, the importance of each evaluation criterion. For the assessment of the competence acquisition initial and final data is being collected (academic year is still unfinished) to evaluate achievements in the following aspects: ability to search and cite bibliographic references, integration capacity, critical behavior, independent learning capacity, coherence and proper writing ability, oral communication and arguing skills. Preliminary questionnaires reveal this initiative as interesting for the students who generally declare that cross-curricular skills are insufficiently worked during the degrees. Data collected in the current academic year will be essential for next year methodology improvements and future implementation at Faculty level.