Innovation project to validate and select items for assessing transversal competencies in higher education

Abstract

[EN] The educational improvement innovation project is focused on determining how to evaluate any competence and which are their main related items that should be used for that purpose. Currently, the selection of items is usually performed by groups of experts. However, two main problems related to this type of selection arise in this case: on the one hand, the selection resulting from different groups of experts may be not the same or similar enough, since it is based on the experience and knowledge of each member. On the other hand, the coefficients or weights a priori assigned to each item on any competence invalidate any a posteriori analysis on its statistical significance and the "real" weight on this competence. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this work presents a methodology able to select, from an objective point of view, the items related to a specific competence, from a set of potentially related ones; furthermore the weights associated to the items are determined. This is carried out by applying a multivariate statistical projection method such as Partial Least Squares (PLS), embedded in a cross-validation process. The paper presents how to preprocess the data, analyze it and obtain the items and their weights to be used for the evaluation of a specific competence.