Assessment of oral and written communication competences in the European Higher Education Area: a proposal of evaluation methodologies

The international accreditation for the Master and Bachelor degrees offered at our university, together with the demands of the employers, have made it clear that the students' curricula should specify not only what they have studied, but also what they are actually able to do. Although the competence based curricula approach has been used in the development of the new programmes for the Master and Bachelor degrees within the European Higher Education Area in recent years, the assessment of these competences is still a pending task. This work presents an 'outcomes' approach for the assessment of the oral and written communication skills within subjects related to mechanical and materials engineering. In particular, this paper proposes some rubrics developed in order to quantify the level of achievement. These rubrics are based on the evaluation of some learning outcomes that can be observed by using different strategies during the course. Conclusions about preliminary results and the difficulties found in order to create these tools are also described here.