Avaliação de competências transversais de estudantes de engenharia: proposta de um sistema associando escalas de autoavaliação, avaliação por pares e por professores

Abstract

Transformations on a global scale, driven by technological development, have been demanding a new profile of engineer. In addition to technical knowledge, it is necessary to train professionals with transferable skills such as leadership, teamwork, communication, creativity, among others, to develop sustainable engineering products, processes and systems. In this context, Higher Education Institutions (HEI) must provide the development and assessment of these competencies. Recent researches and normative documents on engineering education around the world present this scenario of changes. However, they highlight the lack of scientifically validated instruments with psychometric quality for the assessment of soft skills. To shorten this gap, this study investigates to what extent it is feasible to assess transferable skills of engineering students during the execution of teamwork, associating the perception of different evaluating agents. The researchers propose a system for assessing engineering students’ transferable skills (SACTEE, in Portuguese), that comprises transferable skills assessment questionnaires (QuACT, in Portuguese) in the scales of self-assessment, peer and teacher assessment. The Design Science Research (DSR) was the selected research method in association with guidelines for the development of psychological instruments. The literature review allowed identifying soft skills required of engineers and mapping the existing methods for assessing these skills. The researchers collected evidences of content validity comprising, besides the semantic analysis, analyses of the representativeness and relevance of the items. The reliability of the instruments was assessed by means of internal consistency. Confirmatory Focus Groups (GFC) with professors from public and private HEIs analyzed the usefulness and replicability of the system. The study involved altogether 147 students, 23 teachers, and 8 representatives of the academic management of the HEI where the research was conducted, as well as 15 representatives from other public and private HEIs. The results of the study demonstrated the psychometric quality of the instruments - evidence of content validity and internal consistency - and the replicability of the SACTEE, thus contributing to reduce the existing gap in this field of research and in the practice of HEIs for the assessment of students' skills.