Evaluating Competences on First Year Course in Three Years: External Effects on Creative Tension

This study explores the perceived competences of three different generations of engineering students from 2020 to 2022. We analyzed the data collected in the first-year course, Introduction to Engineering, at the University of Turku, Finland utilizing the Cycloid questionnaire (project manager's compe-tences) on the Evolute platform (evolute.fi). The tool consists of questionnaires that measure self-perceived level of and the visioned target state for each competence with a number of statements. Students evaluated their current perceived level of 30 different competencies and their personal vision on the desired level. The full questionnaire was answered by 481 students during these three years. Based on the previous research, the difference between current level and visioned level of competence creates a creative tension that motivates the learning of these competences, the stronger the creative tension (i.e. difference between current and target state), the higher the motivation to learn the competence. Therefore, it might be seen that students could learn or be motivated in learning different skills on the same course due to external circumstances and this should be considered when designing and delivering a course instance. This paper extends the information on students' current and desired state of competence levels. The collected data also shows the potential impact of the external factors, such as the COVID-19 lock-downs. We analyze the competence survey results and show that although there were less statistically significant differences in the current and target states of the students self-perceive competence levels, there were more differences in the creative tension levels between the years. We discuss the potential causes and implications of these differences and how we as educators could utilize this information in course delivery. As a potential future work, the findings could be substantiated with other sources of data such as course results and interviews with the students regarding their self-perceived competences and their personal targets or with longitudinal data from the same students in later state of their studies.