Assessment of Instrumental Skills and Capacity to Use the Techniques and Tools in Practice Within a Subject Related to Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

Over the last few years there is a high interest in developing new curricular programmes of the European Higher Education Area that adapt their masters' and bachelors' degrees to the demands of the employers. The international accreditation of these programmes is not limited to the evaluation of the subjects within the degrees, it also scores the generic and specific competences that will be achieved by the students. These competences are thought to evaluate what the students are actually able to do and therefore, they are useful not only to adapt the degrees to the existing European working model, but also to facilitate the students' incorporation into it. Nevertheless, the methodologies for the assessment of these competences are still a pending task that requires more learning experience. In order to contribute to the progress of this topic, this work presents an 'outcomes' approach for the assessment of the students' ability to use the techniques, skills and tools for engineering related practical issues within mechanical engineering subjects. In particular, this paper designs individual questionnaires for IT and laboratory practices in order to quantify the domain level of the students in the usage of a commercial software and in the comprehension of technical and instrumental concepts. These tools are based on the evaluation of some learning outcomes that can be observed by using different strategies along the academic year. Some results regarding a first attempt to use this tool are also analysed in this paper. Finally, some conclusions are derived from these experiences in order to improve our proposal in the future.