Ethical dilemmas and debates as teaching methodologies to develop critical thinking competence

Abstract

[EN] The creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has generated important changes in the teaching and learning processes. Students have become the protagonists of their own learning process and the task of the teachers has become that of guiding and tutoring the student in that process. As for the curricula, these should have as a primary objective the acquisition of Competences by students, expanding, without excluding, the traditional approach based on content and teaching hours. Emphasis should be placed on the methods to be used for the learning of these Competences, as well as on the procedures to evaluate their acquisition. Within the framework of EHEA, the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has developed an institutional project in which 13 Transversal Competences have been defined. All students must work on these Competences and be evaluated for their acquisition throughout their studies. One of the 13 Transversal Competencies of the UPV is ¿Critical Thinking¿. Some of the formative activities that can be used for the development of this Competence in students are case studies, ethical dilemmas, oral presentations, forums, debates, etc. In order to assess the degree of development achieved by the students, the most frequent procedures are exercises or open written tests and oral presentations. As evaluation instruments, the checklists and rubrics stand out. This work shows examples of application of teaching methodologies called ethical dilemmas and debates in a subject of the Degree in Engineering in Industrial Design and Product Development taught at the UPV. The method chosen to evaluate the degree of acquisition of this Competence is oral presentations. Therefore, an example of the rubric used for the evaluation by the teacher and among peers of these oral presentations is also presented in this work.