Developing competences in Higher Education: the importance of assessment feedback

• Autor(a) principal: Sá, Cristina Manuela
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/id.v5i3.4517

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the promotion of an education that leads to the development of competences (European Commission, 2007; Perrenoud, 1999) has been a main concern of Portuguese education policies (Ministério da Educação, 2001; Reis, 2009). Higher Education has also embraced this concern through the implementation of the Bologna propositions. The Department of Education of the University of Aveiro (Portugal) has been working along these lines since 2007. This paper describes a study which is being conducted within a first cycle degree in a course relating the issues of education in the mother tongue to the training students are concurrently receiving in educational institutions. Three research questions were defined: i) Is it possible to design teaching strategies in Higher Education leading to the development of competences that allow the students to adapt to a greater variety of educational contexts? ii) Can these strategies promote an awareness of the need to approach education in the mother tongue in a transversal way, taking into account its importance for success at school and socio-professional integration? iii) Which role can feedback assessment play in this process? This paper deals with the third question. We analysed data concerning i) the performance of the students corresponding to their grades and ii) their conceptions, gathered in the individual essays they wrote, containing their critical views about the work they developed. The results of this analysis (mixing statistics and content analysis) stressed the need to introduce changes in the course programme and in the assessment methods it proposes. Assessment feedback appeared as a key element.