Elaboration process of a map of activities for students in different levels in the competence "Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship"

Abstract

[EN] The student's skills to innovate, be creative and be entrepreneur are, in most cases, unknown to the teacher when he/she begins his/her teaching activity with a new group of students. In general, the initial level of a student in non-transversal competences can be known by the structure of the previously studied curricula. However, for transversal competences, this starting level is not easy to identify. Furthermore, we found that there are more significant differences between students in the levels of transversal competences than in the levels of non-transversal competences.

The diversity of levels in the classroom for the competence led us to propose a map of appropriate activities for each level. The process of elaborating a map of activities for students in different levels in the competence "Innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship" includes the following steps: 1. Identification of activities. The construction of the map requires the identification of learning activities oriented towards the acquisition of the transversal competence. In our case, 11 activities were identified as suitable to work in the "Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship" competence. 2. Definition of the levels. Four categories have been defined to identify the different levels: D. Not achieved; C. Under development; B. Good; A. Excellent. Furthermore, this scale was used for I. Undergraduate students (1st and 2nd year), II. Undergraduate students (3rd and 4th year), and III. Master students. 3. Classification of activities: Data collection. Data from teachers who are experts in the competence should be collected systematically to classify the activities. Thus, each teacher assigned each activity to one or two levels of the scale (from A to D), this for the 3 levels of studies (Level I: 1st and 2nd year, Level II: 3rd and 4th year, Level III: Master). A restriction has been introduced: the level assigned to an activity (A, B, C or D) must be maintained or evolve to lower levels on the scale as we move from level I to level II and level III (due to student progression). 4. Classification of activities: Analysis. The data collected require an analysis process to assign activities at each level. It is necessary to quantify (4 to 1) the qualitative scale (A to D) in order to perform an interquartile analysis. This type of analysis was selected because it is very little affected by extreme values. The median value was taken to obtain the value of the level. A debate was required in case of a high interquartile range. 5. Classification of activities: Map construction. The numerical values of each activity must be transformed to the original scale (A-D). This information was used to build three activity maps, one for each level of studies (I, II and III). 6. Map analysis. The location of the activities on the map allows: on the one hand, a) to identify sets of activities that work at the same level, so it may not be necessary to deploy a whole set of activities in the classroom, since with the completion of one of these activities the students would have already covered the level. And, on the other hand, b) to identify levels not covered by any activity.

The process has achieved the established objectives by presenting a map of activities by levels.