Attempts to develop students’ generic skills by raising their awareness in experimental practice

To develop the generic skills of students, colleges and universities are required to improve the curriculum to encourage students to engage proactively in learning and strengthening their competency to utilize acquired skills effectively in the society. However, no teaching methods as such have been established, especially, those of enhancing students' competency. Competency is difficult to improve in a short period, therefore, continuous, effective approaches are needed. In this paper, based on the results of the continuous surveys, we present skills and competency of students which are required in the real world but show only low growth and need to be enhanced by the time they graduate from Kosen (five-year technical colleges in Japan), namely, planning, plan implementation and collaboration. Then we propose curriculum supplements and report on their effects. There are two points we attempted. First, to make students aware of the skills and competency to be improved, self-evaluation was performed before and after the course. Second, teachers tried to accelerate the progress of students' skills by changing the way of conducting experiment classes. We report on the effects of these two points based on the evaluation by the students themselves.