Student Self-Assessment in Higher Education: Enhancing Competence in Economics and Business Management

1. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENTP. Aparicio Chueca; M. Badia-Miro; Y. Blasco Martel; M. Bosch Princep; A. Carreras-Marín; G. Cairó-i-Céspedes; I. Maestro Yarza ; I. Morillo López.Universitat de Barcelona (SPAIN) 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

2. Index • Introduction • 2. Methodology • Conclusions • References STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

3. Introduction • We present a project that raises a first attempt to approach the assessment of competencesfor a whole degree in the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Barcelona. • We have designed a sequential process to be able to depict the actual situation of the acquisition of competences by our students of the degree on Business Management and Administration. • It promotes management skills in business, finance, sales, production and human resources, and it aims to give a global vision of the functional areas of business organization and the ability to create and manage business ventures in public- and private-sector contexts. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

4. The project is based on two key training periods: the first year of the degree and the last one. To approach the general picture on the acquisition of competences in these two moments we have decided to use polls. • Deeper analysis on that will be done through the use of rubrics in specific subjects and for particular competences in the intermediate year courses. • A first step in this direction has already been done in a previous teaching innovation project for a single competence involving three different subjects of the first year course . Now we go further with the design of a broader process in a higher scale that aims to give a global picture for the whole degree. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

5. 2. Methodology • According to AQU (2009) generic skills can be acquired only at the very end of the whole training process. However in order to achieve this final learning output, generic skills must be promoted through the whole learning process. • We focus on the five transversal skills of our University: • Ethical values • Learning capabilities and responsibility • Team working skills • Creative and entrepreneurship • Sustainability STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

6. According to Prades (2005), assessing competences involves three stages: diversifying strategies for gathering information, diversifying assessment moments in time and using multiple agents of assessment (stakeholders). • Our methodology consists in a combination of self-marking polls and self-assessment rubrics into consecutive training years of the degree: • Self-marking polls are devoted to have a general picture of the evolution of the students' views through the whole training process. • Rubrics allows us to go deeper into its nature. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

7. Methodology in order to have a global overview on a wider sample of our students. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT Fig. 1 Process to assess students and teachers’ perceptions for the acquisition of competences 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

8. The first stage focuses our first year students. We plan to collect the students’ perceptions of their skills as well as the teacher’s perceptions about the same topic. • The first and fourth stages are placed in the initial and final moments of the training process. At these two phases, we use polls in order to assess through perceptions the acquisition of general skills by the students (Table 2). • The questions of the poll are classified by each competence. Definitions are based in Alsina et al. (2013), that allows us to go deeper into each one of these definitions, proposing specific meanings in a very interdisciplinary way. According to these more specific definitions we have developed a set of items for the poll. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

9. Table 2: Example of poll to assess competences in stage 1 and 4 of the project STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

10. As polls are going to be the main source of information, our analysis is mostly based on the perceptions of students and teachers, instead of the assessment or self-assessment based on specific exercises: • One of the reasons of focusing on perceptions is based on the results of our previous teaching innovation action. We have found strong evidence about a persistent over-valuation of the students’ self-assessment compared to the teacher’s assessment, Carreras et al. (2014). • An additional reason to massive use of polls consists in the large quantity of students involved in our degree. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

11. In a second step, we work with a map of competences by subjects for the whole degree. In this case, we have used the previous work done by the Academic Team Authorities of our faculty. • To develop our project, we must to identify, from this map of competences, the specific subjects to evaluate each particular competence. • This map will help us in the future to achieve a better balance among competences developed in each subject, improving its acquisition by the students. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

12. Table 1: Map of competences by subjects for the whole degree. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

13. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT Source: Work done by the Academic Team Authorities on Business and Administration. University of Barcelona. 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

14. In the third stage, rubrics can be used by each teacher to assess competences embodied into the specific contents of their subject. • The teachers’ team selected into this stage should be trained into the methodologies of assessing competences using rubrics in order to homogenise the results. • We propose the use of rubrics to assess each of the transversal competences. They will be designed to promote the acquisition of competences during the training process inside each subject as well as an assessment tool. • To develop this analysis we plan three levels: a first one in the first and second courses of the degree, a second level in the third and fourth years, and a final level in the compulsory final project. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

15. Finally, at the fifth stage we have to compile and compare the information coming from the previous stages. • We will be able to identify weaknesses in specific skills, and placed it into specific moments of the training process. • It is going to be of special interest to see how much the initial level influenced the subsequent stages of the training process. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

16. 3. Conclusions • In a previous teaching innovation project we have experienced how to assess a particular competence from three different disciplines in the first year of the degree on Business and Administration. Our results pointed out a remarkably low level on the analytical skills of our students and a huge over-valuation on the perceptions of it by themselves. • In this work, we have designed a project to be able to have a global picture on the acquisition of five general competences defined by our university: • We have designed assessment actions into different training stages in order to analyze it dynamically. • It combines the use of polls at the first and final courses with the use of rubrics into specific subjects in the middle of the training process. • Its implementation will need a specific training of a broader teaching team. • It is organized around a map of competences for all the subjects of the degree. It helps us to identify the unbalanced use of competences in the whole degree as well as some incoherencies between competences as global learning objectives and competences as assessment outputs into specific teaching plans. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014

17. References [1]G. E. Miller, “The assessment of clinical skills/competence/performance,” Acad. Med., vol. 65, no. Number 9, septemberSuplement, pp. 63–67, 1990. [2]A. Carreras-Marín, Y. Blasco, M. Badia-Miró, M. Bosch, I. Morillo, G. Cairo-i-Céspedes, and M. D. Casares-Vidal, “The promotion and assessment of generic skills from interdisciplinary teaching teams,” in Edulearn13 Proceedings, 2013, pp. 201–207. [3]AQU, “Guia per a l’avaluació de competències en l'àrea de ciènciessocials.,” 2009. [4]P. Alsina, A. M. Argila Irurita, M. ArózteguiTrenchs, F. J. Arroyo Cañada, M. Badia-Miró, A. Carreras Marín, M. Colomer, M. GraceneaZugarramurdi, L. Halbaut, P. Juárez Vives, F. Llorente Galera, L. Marzo Ruiz, M. Mato Ferré, X. Pastor Durán, F. Peiró Martínez, M. Sabariego Puig, and B. Vila Merino, “Rúbriques per a l’avaluació de competències,” Quad. docència Univ., vol. 26, 2013. [5]A. PradesNebot, “Les competènciestransveralsi la formacióuniversitària.” Universitat de Barcelona, 20-Dec-2005. [6]A. Carreras-Marín, Y. Blasco, M. Badia-Miró, M. Bosch, I. Morillo, G. Cairo-i-Céspedes, and M. D. Casares-Vidal, “The importance of perceptions on the learning process. using rubrics to assess and improve general skills in learning of economics,” in INTED2014 Proceedings, 2014, pp. 5477–5482. STUDENT SELF-ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies Barcelona - 7th - 9th of July 2014