Valutazione e soft skills nella didattica universitaria

The “Didattica per competenze (Competency based learning and teaching)” project, activated at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia for the 2016-2018 three-year period, starts from the reflection on the acquisition of soft skills in the academic context and is based on the hypothesis that the rethinking of teaching strategies can successfully influence the development of soft skills by the students. It consists of two main actions:
 1. the training of professors and tutors that chose the target skills (team working and problem solving) and the teaching methodology (Team- Based learning) to use for redesigning the structure of their own courses; 2. the measurement of the soft skills of the students attending the experimental courses and those identified as control group.
 In the second year of the project the experimentation involved 16 courses for the experimental group and 14 for the control group (about 1800 students); in the third one, 12 new teachers joined the experimental actions. In the project the processes related to evaluation and assessment concerned three fields: assessment in classroom; evaluation of the procedure through the use of questionnaires and focus groups for the detection of the opinions of teachers and students involved; measurement of soft skills with entry and exit tests for control and experimental groups.
This paper regards the last of the three processes just described. From the first analysis of the collected data, we can observe a variation of the scores obtained in the two tests by the students. If you categorize the results in relation to the level of competence measured at the beginning, you see that the most significant improvements concern the students with lower scores in the entry test and that when the level measured in the entry test increases, the variation decreases until it becomes negative.