Operational Development of the Competence

Abstract

Acquiring the skill to apply knowledge in practice is a competence with many facets in the formation of a graduate. For example, the official memory of the degree of Chemistry of the University of Burgos contains as a transversal competence to be able "to solve problems in an effective way", as generic competence to be able "to plan, design and execute practical investigations" and as a subject-specific competence "...to validate models fit with experimental data and to optimize chemical process and products". In the "Tuning Educational Structures in Europe" (December 2006, http://tuning.unideusto.org/tuningeu/) it is stated (page 46) that "In fact, one of the most striking results of the questionnaire (submitted to graduates, employers and academics) was the very high degree of correlation between the opinion of graduates and employers in relation to the importance and rank given to the different competences. These two groups were of the opinion that the most important competence to be developed was, between others, the capacity for applying knowledge in practice". In the annex 1 of the same document (Tuning subject area findings: Chemistry) appears also "The capacity for applying knowledge in practice" as generic competence and "Skills in the evaluation, interpretation and synthesis of chemical information and data" as a chemistry-related cognitive skill. The interpretation of this competence is also multiple, for example, in some cases it is described as "facing concrete problems by using basic concepts", whereas in most cases it is described as the ability to perform specific academic tasks. As a consequence, the different teaching methods to help the students achieve this competence reflect different approaches to practice. In Chemistry it is emphasised the need to provide appropriate tools and methods as well as opportunities for problem solving. Most of the times this competence is acquired out, in connection with the world of work; in chemistry it is usual that final year projects are carried out (partially or totally) in an industrial environment. The present work shows that learning activities can be designed so that the student acquires this competence also in his usual academic environment. The present work shows experiences that consist of asking students to do complex tasks that imply the use of knowledge from several subjects. In particular, the goal is to solve an optimization problem by designing and doing the corresponding experiments, and taking also into account the whole cost in two experimental cases. The two laboratory activities proposed emphasize an essential aspect when applying the theory to practice: there is a methodology that allows one to make objective the sequence of experimental activities needed to solve a given problem and to explicitly include restrictions no necessarily "academic" such as cost. Further, from an academic point of view, the methodology involves multiple skills, basic skills from Mathematics and Chemistry should be jointly applied, as well as concepts about the modelling from experimental data, precision of estimates and results (according to ISO norms, EU norms, etc.), data analysis and optimization with constraints.