Development of Procedures to Assess Problem-Solving Competence in Computing Engineering

In the context of higher education, a competence may be understood as the combination of skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and abilities that underpin effective and/or superior performance in a professional area. The aim of the work reported here was to design a set of procedures to assess a transferable competence, i.e., problem solving, that is basic for learning, in both academic and professional life, and crucial for engineering. The study involved a total of 71 students enrolled at three universities at two different stages of their studies. The development phases of the assessment device included an analysis of the competence and its facets, the design of the assessment task, the development of criteria to rate student performance, and the analysis of the basic psychometric properties for assessment methods in the area of education. The conclusion was drawn that the training process and the elaboration of scoring criteria are costly but necessary if objectivity in the interpretation of results is to be guaranteed. The main achievement of this project was the development of a procedure that measures learning outcomes and, more specifically, problem solving.