New Perspectives in Science Education

At present, most of science and/or engineering programs at high schools and universities describe what the students are expected to know and be able to do by the time of graduation. These relate to the skills, knowledge, and behaviors that students acquire as they progress through the program to prepare graduates to attain the program educational objectives. Among the course components, the successful achievement of the scientific objectives is clearly a basic assessment of the technical work and a good demonstration of the student’s level of understanding. However, other components, including project planning and research methodology skills, critical thinking and formulating research questions, data collection and analysis, interpersonal communication and team behaviors, are definitely important outcomes of the course. For this reason, a set of rubrics were devised to assess each component of the grading policy through defined primary indicators for each activity. The paper presents a case study of skill’s development within the scope of science teaching in electronics engineering curricula. A problem-based learning approach was used to lead the learning process of the students. The aim of the paper is to check if the use of rubrics for skill assessment is a useful method in terms of easiness and short time of application, and alignment with the active teaching approach adopted. A set of 50 students were involved, during the fall semester of 2013, in the experience of developing an energy audit of an industrial heat and power station. A term paper assignment was given to students, organized in teams of four members. The expected outcomes are the ability to perform the technical analysis of the industrial station in terms of mass and energy balances, and the development of personal skills such as data collection and analysis, problem-solving, critical thinking, teamwork, autonomous learning and the ability to apply theoretical knowledge to practice. A set of rubrics were developed intended to assess each mentioned skill, with the requisite of being easy to understand by the students and short time consuming to fulfill it. Correlation between skill development and final team performance and grading is presented. Teacher’s perception of the experience was obtained by means of personal interviews. The paper could be of interest to those readers that want to promote skill development in other science courses.