Student evaluation in the university

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to explore the relationships between the two primary activities in higher education institutions: teaching and research. This task could be done from different perspectives. Due to opportunity and interest reasons I have focused the content of this article in two broad and complementary issues. The first one deals with the meaning of interdependencies between research and teaching, its coincidences and divergences, and its influence in the improvement of both activities. The second one, explores to what extend higher education institutions and those who work in them use research results about how people learn and the nature of knowledge to organise teaching and learning environments to enhance the improvement of teaching. In recent decades there have been important transformations in the field of evaluation in general, and in particular in the field of learning evaluation. The projected changes in the university context can be justified in many ways. We draw special attention to the following: a) The continuous incorporation on new learning objectives which are necessary for the university in the context of the information society: transferable skills, working in groups and in networks, capacities for selecting information and self-education, knowing how to develop autonomous behaviour patterns, etc. All these learning objectives are competences which go beyond those offered by traditional evaluation procedures. b) The development of new evaluation strategies (conceptual maps, portfolios, etc. ) which involve complex skills and metacognitive processes which are more in harmony with the new personal and professional competences. The article analyses different approaches to student evaluation in the university context, identifying a number of possible formats and offering evaluation techniques both traditional and innovative.