Abstract:

Ability for oral communication and teamwork are key skills for any engineer that are not always properly dealt in conventional teaching-learning processes. For this reason, a pilot experience is being developed in several degree and master subjects related to thermal engineering at University of Zaragoza.

The methodology followed in this work includes several sequential activities. First, the experience is planned and practical tasks for students as well as evaluation rules are defined. Then, two workshops of 90 minutes are developed: the first one focused on teamwork and the second dealing with oral communication; and they are applied to both undergraduate and graduate students. Afterwards, students develop their subject tasks in small groups (usually in pairs) under the supervision of lecturers who collect main aspects in observation forms. Next step is the public oral presentation of activities, what allows students to put in practice skills developed in the previous workshops. Evaluation is developed by considering aspects related to teamwork and oral communication skills. Finally, results of the pilot experience are assessed by using the aforementioned observation forms and evaluation results, as well as surveys among students. Results are compared with the same subjects in previous years when no specific training on oral communication and teamwork had been provided.

Results show not only how students improve their skills but mainly how they evaluate the experience. In particular, the collaboration of lecturers of technical subjects with a psychologist enables to tackle the problem with different and complementary perspectives, which increases the interest of the approach. Finally, besides the improvement of skills of students directly involved, methodology and materials developed (surveys, evaluation forms…) make easy to export the experience to other subjects within the same and other Universities.

Keywords:

Oral communication, teamwork, engineering, higher education.