PUZZLE TECHNIQUES FOR TRAINING ORAL AND WRITTEN SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION SKILLS

The Final Bachelor Degree Project (TFG) is supposed to be carried out using the skills that the student has acquired in the different courses along the 4 years of education. It is not meant to be a course to acquire new skills. However, the evaluation of the TFG is based on a written document (bachelor thesis) and the oral presentation in front of an examination committee.

The authors have detected that the students are not practicing enough the scientific report writing and oral presentation. In some cases, the TFG is the first written report or oral exam that the students are performing, which makes it a very unfair evaluation method. According to this, it is important to promote the students to acquire the corresponding skills, by including methods in other courses.

In this work, we present the results for a learning activity carried out in the course “Integrated Management Systems”, in the 3rd year of the bachelor degree in Chemical Engineering. The course has a very practical approach, where the student is using solving problem based learning methods. We decided to derive a 20% of the content and the evaluation of the course on a puzzle method for big group (60 students), covering the more theoretical aspects of the course. The students formed groups of size of 5 students each. They were assigned to prepare written document and an oral presentation about one of the most popular management systems: Quality, Environment, Energy, Safety and Health, as well as any other proposed by the groups. In order to keep concordance, the students should all based their work in the ISO norm for management systems, i.e., ISO 9001, 14001, 50001 and 45001.

To practice the competences related to the scientific report writing, the students were requested to deliver the document in a specific format, including references and bibliography, and covering automatic numbering and crossed-referencing. The oral presentations were requested to be exposed in a limited time range, and were accompanied for questions from the docent and the other groups. Furthermore, in order to promote the non-presenting groups to pay attention to the presenters, and to complete the puzzle method, all students were submitted to a questionnaire that included questions about all the presentations.

Based on the satisfaction surveys from the students and the marks obtained in the activity, it can be concluded that the procedure allows the students to practice those necessary skills while covering theoretical aspects of any other course. The students considered the activity useful for practicing the competences, but they stated the difficulty to work in groups.