Best practices implementation in Bachelors’ Final Projects

• Published in: Red U Vol. 11; pp. 269 - 278
• Main Authors: Davinia Hernandez-Leo, Verónica Moreno Oliver, Irene Camps, Robert Clarisó, Alejandra Martínez Monés, Maria Jesús Galindo, Javier Melero
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Spanish
• Published: Universitat Politècnica de València 01.11.2013
• Subjects: educación en ingeniería; evaluación; seguimiento; trabajo fin de grado
• ISSN: 1887-4592
• DOI: 10.4995/redu.2013.5556

Completing a Bachelor’s Final Project (BFP) is mandatory in all the new Spanish University Degrees (independent of the university and discipline to form). The main role of the BFP is to facilitate an integrated assessment of the specific and transversal competences that students have developed during the Degree in the context of a relatively large project. This paper presents a study developed in three Spanish universities, concretely in Engineering Education. Nine excellence practices were formulated and evaluated in 21 projects. These nine practices were related with both monitoring and assessment processes, considering aspects answering the what, how, who and when questions (i.e. related to competences, methodology, agents and moments). The results point out to a number of practices that have shown to be especially useful such as the combination of formative and summative assessment, being monitored by different people in different moments, using rubrics as a monitoring and assessment tool, tutoring schedule for the whole process, etc. Finally, the potential transferability to other contexts was also analyzed.