Integration of students out-of-class work in teaching-learning process

Abstract

[EN] Out-of-Class Work (OCW) is a crucial part of students’ learning process. The continuous assessment of students’ OCW provides many opportunities to fix students’ mistakes and misunderstandings, while improving courses’ contents. Among many others, important aspects concerning OCW that are mostly ignored today in the evaluation process relate to: 1) how students hand over assignments and 2) the time they devote to each assignment. The Tools and Strategies for Competences Assessment (TASCA) is an Innovation and Quality Education Team of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). Its goal is to gather and analyze OCW information in order to obtain evidences of the degree of achievement of certain learning outcomes, improve students’ on-site learning experience and enrich the course evaluation process. Preliminary results show that the lack of adequate OCW supervision leads to situations where teachers underestimate (or overestimate) the complexity of assignments. This leads to a waste of time or overloads the student. Coordination among courses is of prime importance to adequate students’ work to avoid workload peaks. Moreover, there lack of relationship between the time devoted to tasks and the attained results lead to especial cases where despite the time invested in tasks resulting grades are low in general. This may reflect the fact that such tasks are poorly specified or are not adequately connected to courses’ contents. Finally, assessing the usefulness of tasks as perceived by students seems also mandatory attending to the impact that such perception has on students’ motivation