Strengthening the critical thinking competence g15 using social media and its assessment by corubrics

Resumo

The Bologna process and the European Higher Education Area (HEA) aim to align the evaluation with the competences that the students need to acquire during the teaching-learning process. In this sense, in previous projects we observed that G15 competence of critical thinking needs to be strengthened in the Higher Education Agriculture students at University of Valladolid in Spain.On the one hand, to strengthen the G15 in Higher Education, the teachers have confirmed that social media, due to students familiarity and interest, can be used to create students´ own innovative recommendations and critiques and to improve students´ critical thinking. In this line, the young people in Spain recognise an intensive use of electronics and the 90% of them own 2-5 electronic devices. The most popular social media are, Facebook with 2,271 million users in 2019, Youtube with 1,900 million, WhatsApp with 1,500 million and Instagram with 1,000 million.On the other hand, there is unanimity in the scientific community on the need to improve the quality of the assessment in Higher Education, revising and revamping the evaluation by means of diverse, varied and innovative assessment tools aligned with the competences that the students need to acquire. In this sense, rubrics are recognized tools that evaluate the learning process aligned with the competences-based learning model. Rubrics allow students to self-monitoring their learning process contributing to their teaching responsibility and to self-evaluate their work quality and possible improvement. In this sense, CoRubrics is a digital tool that allows obtained the students self-evaluation, teachers-evaluation and students co-evaluation. This paper presents a Teaching Innovation Project that aims to strengthen the G15 competence of critical thinking by means of social media and its evaluation using the CoRubrics tool in the Higher Education Agriculture students of University of Valladolid.The methodology of the project included:i) the inclusion of an activity of critical thinking using social media in the subject practices,ii) the creation of a rubric for the assessment of the competences needed to acquire by students,iii) the implementation of the activities and rubric by the Higher Education of Agriculture students of Valladolid University,iv) the teachers evaluation, students self-evaluation and co-evaluation andv) the comparison, discussion of the results and conclusions by teachers.The results showed the students´ high interest in activities using social media enhancing the G15 competence of critical thinking within the improvement of the students´ self-evaluation and evaluation of their own progress. Moreover, it was proved the consciousness-raising of the teachers to align the evaluation with the competences to be acquired by the students.