Abstract:

Ambition:
In 2016 the Teaching Innovation Group (TIG) INGENIAQ (University of León, Spain) started a pilot scheme with the objective of putting engineering students and companies in contact through student practice. Such practical activity involved the students in finding solutions to real cases from real companies, prioritizing a direct interaction between the student and a representative from the company. This approach has been applied to several subject areas in the following studies: agricultural, environmental, chemical and industrial engineering, at the level of ‘Degree’ and ‘Master’. Despite the outstanding results in terms of the students’ response to the activity, such uncommon practical activity poses the problem of how to evaluate it. To solve this situation, the TIG INGENIAQ started the project EVALUA-PRACTIC with the purpose of developing a collaborative evaluation of the student practice based on rubrics.
Objectives: The general objective was to create rubrics and to evaluate their performance for the evaluation of the aforementioned student practice in engineering studies.

The specific objectives of this work were:
(i) to develop the rubrics for the evaluation of the practical activity;
(ii) to find the weak points and the inconsistences of the rubrics design process;
(iii) to use the rubrics, at a pilot scale, in six engineering subjects;
(iv) to compare the results of the teachers’ evaluation with the students’ expectations, from their self-evaluation;
(v) to assess the usefulness of the rubrics for the evaluation of the practice.

Results and conclusions:
With this work we have developed the rubrics for the evaluation of the practical activities of six engineering subjects, and we have evaluated them in a two-step process including a cross-validation within the TIG, and a validation with the company representative. Because of the cross-evaluation process, we have detected that a weak point of the rubrics is that there is a great variation of approaches for the same transversal and general competences in different subjects, depending on the teacher. To solve this situation, which can confuse the students, a coordinated approach is required for the formulation of the rubrics. The companies’ representative highlighted that the main weak point of the teaching−learning system of university studies, is the lack of achievement of the competences related to autonomous and individual work, and that the graduates are afraid to make decisions. The use of the rubrics for the evaluation of the six subjects has been very successful because it has helped students to understand the objective of the student practices and the components of the evaluation process. Thus, the differences between the students’ expectations and the teachers’ marks have been kept to a minimum, which is a substantial improvement with respect to the previous situation without rubrics. The system based on rubrics has the disadvantage of being time-consuming to prepare but, in principle, they make the final evaluation of the student practices easier and more objective. The main constraint of the system based on rubrics is that, due to the overwhelming period corresponding to the end of the semester, some teachers consider that a traditional evaluation based on ‘the feeling’ about the students’ performance is less time-consuming than a detailed evaluation of different items.

Keywords:

Rubric, engineering, practice, company, self-evaluation.