University Teachers’ Coordination: a Key Factor for Competences Assessment

The assessment of competences emerges as a key aspect if we want to be consistent with the new educational paradigm, particularly in the field of higher education. In that sense, in order to get a continuous improvement in the teaching practice, an effective coordination among teachers is a very useful mechanism. It can help to share problems, deal with different tasks and reach a consensus on assessment criteria. In this paper we present a project concerning the coordination of teachers from different subject areas. All the teachers in this group have the same concerns: how to develop and how to assess general competences in their lessons. To that end, collaborative work has been done in their subjects by organizing the different tasks in different phases: the key competences to be developed have been selected and defined, the indicators and rubrics for their assessment have been agreed upon, and specific training activities have been designed to implement the assessment tools. In order to involve the students in their learning process, self-assessment and peer-assessment has been carried out. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the impact of this coordination work, the students' and the teachers' perceptions of the new assessment tools designed have also be collected by means of several questionnaires especifically made and also by resorting to group reflection sessions. The regular meetings held by the participating teachers allowed us to check that the teachers' coordination encourages reflection on our teaching duties and allows the exchange of experiences, thus increasing their motivation