Article 2007

Assessing the relevance of higher education courses

GP
Gómez, Pedro
 GL
González López, María José
 GF
Gil-Cuadra, Francisco
 LJ
Lupiáñez-Gómez, José Luís
 MM
Moreno, María Francisca
 RL
Rico, Luis
 RA
Romero Albaladejo, Isabel M.ª
Evaluation and Program Planning
Journal · Vol. 30 · Issue 2 · pp. 149-160
Abstract

The establishment of the European Higher Education Area has involved specifying lists of professional competencies that programs are expected to develop, and with this the need for procedures to measure how every course within a higher education program is aligned with the program's competencies. We propose an instrument for characterizing this alignment, a process that we call assessing the relevance of a course. Using information from the course syllabus (objectives, contents and assessment scheme), our instrument produces indicators for characterizing the syllabus in terms of a competence list and for assessing its coherence. Because assessment involves quality, the results obtained can also be used to revise and improve the course syllabus. We illustrate this process with an example of a methods course from a mathematics teacher education program at a Spanish university. © 2007.

Keywords

Author Keywords

Higher education Assessment Teacher Education Competency-based education Quality alignment Relevance

Index Keywords

Teaching higher education learning adult human Humans Article Quality control Vocational education curriculum university sector education professional competence Educational Measurement methodology educational model Models, Educational competency-based education standard Europe Education, Professional mathematics assessment method
Author Affiliations
Departamento de Didáctica de la Matemática, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Granada, Spain
Departamento de Matemáticas, Estadística y Computación, Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Cantabria, Spain
Departamento de Didáctica de la Matemática y de las Ciencias Experimentales, Universidad de Almería, Almeria, Almeria, Spain
Funding & Acknowledgements
Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, MECD
This work was partially supported by Project SEJ2005-07364/EDUC of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. We wish to thank María C. Cañadas, Vilma M. Mesa and an anonymous reviewer for useful comments on a draft of this article.
References 10 References
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