Abstract
Industry and academia around the world stress the importance of professional skills (also known as soft skills, generic skills, or transferable skills) so it is necessary to be able to assess students’ attainment of these skills. An innovative method was developed in the USA for assessment of these skills in an engineering program (Ater Kranov, Hauser, Olsen, & Girardeau, 2008); this method was based around student discussion of an open-ended, unresolved, discipline-related problem, held face-to-face and subsequently analyzed using a rubric. In the research project described here, the method was adapted for the United Arab Emirates by writing appropriate scenarios for computing students, by modifying the rubric and by running the discussion on an online discussion board. The primary aims were to determine the feasibility of adapting the method and to examine its suitability. The results of the study showed that the method can be adapted and employed very successfully with UAE students. This paper presents the method, its adaptation and implementation, and the results obtained.
Citation
Schoepp, K. and Danaher, M. (2016), "An innovative approach to assessing professional skills learning outcomes: a UAE pilot study", Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Gulf Perspectives, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 53-72. https://doi.org/10.18538/lthe.v13.n1.213
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016 Kevin Schoepp and Maurice Danaher
License
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
Acknowledgements
Publisher's note: The Publisher would like to inform the reader that the article “An innovative approach to assessing professional skills learning outcomes: a UAE pilot study” has changed pagination. Previous pagination was pp. 1-20. The updated pagination for the article is now pp. 53-72. The Publisher apologises for any inconvenience caused.