Assessing the relevance of higher education courses.
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.
Gómez
Pedro
P
Departamento de Didáctica de la Matemática, Universidad de Granada, Campus de Cartuja, Granada 18071, Spain. pgomez@valnet.es
González
María Jose
MJ
Gil
Francisco
F
Lupiáñez
José Luis
JL
Moreno
María Francisca
MF
Rico
Luis
L
Romero
Isabel
I
D000328:Adult; D003162:Competency-Based Education / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*; D004517:Education, Professional / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*; D004521:Educational Measurement / Q000592:standards; D005060:Europe; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008433:Mathematics; D017145:Models, Educational; D011361:Professional Competence / Q000592:standards*; D011786:Quality Control; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods