Improving the students interest and involvement in theoretical subjects using self-assessment techniques

Resumen

Students are more motivated in broadly practical subjects than in strictly theoretical ones. Not only this motivation, but the desire to do proactive work in many of them becomes a powerful tool for improvement of knowledge. In this sense, self-evaluation methodology was proposed to improve the interest, motivation and involvement of the students in a theoretical subject.This paper collects the results of the implementation of the self-assessment technique and evaluation among students of the subject of Viticulture, third year of the degree in Oenology at the University of Cadiz. The main objective of these evaluations relied on the development of both evaluation and critical judgment skills, as well as the improvement of collaborative interaction between students through teamwork. For this purpose, it was planned that the students would make a scientific poster working on a topic related to the subject matter of the course. Once the final work was performed, 50% of the final qualification would be obtained from their own self-evaluation and from the evaluation by the other groups.To carry out the assessments, as an evaluation tool, we used evaluation questionnaires created by the teachers of the subject through the free use platform Google Drive. Students had to complete three different questionnaires at the end of the activity. A self-evaluation questionnaire, a questionnaire to evaluate the individual work of each member of their group and a questionnaire to evaluate the work done by the other groups.By increasing the students' involvement with obtaining better qualifications, there emerged the demand for improvement in their content suggestions and in the discussion of such material among their classmates.