Abstract:

Currently, transversal skills are incorporated in the Spanish higher education system with the aim to adapt higher education to the new necessities of the today’s society and form better-skilled professionals. Specific skills refer to knowledge and abilities needed to accomplish academic responsibilities and diverse specific or technical tasks. These skills are directly related to the academic subject objectives and are usually the main source of knowledge assessment. Transversal skills include knowledge, character features and work habits that are believed to be significantly important to success in today’s society. Therefore, transversal skills can also be part of all academic subjects.

The Polytechnic University of Valencia has implemented a program for incorporating 13 transversal skills to the higher education system. Specific and transversal skills have to be assessed individually. For this reason, teachers are usually overwhelmed by the amount of extra work involved in the evaluation of the transversal skills.

This paper proposes an alternative procedure for effectively teaching and evaluating specific and transversal skills in an optional school subject about architectural conservation. The main goal of this study is to prove that content based knowledge and transversal competencies can be taught and assessed together in higher education with no extra work for teachers neither students.

Keywords:

Transversal skills, assessment, higher education.