Abstract
The purpose of this work is to find out the students’ perception of the level of development of competences in the area of Social Sciences, Geography, and History. It has been developed taking into account what has been learned in the area, the level of difficulty for its acquisition, the assessment tools, and the transfer to a real situation. The development of a scale—original and unprecedented—called Evaluation of the Perception of Competences from the Social Sciences (EPECOSICO) has allowed, through a descriptive and quantitative study of validation of the instrument with an intentional sampling, to know the opinion of more than 1400 students of 4th year of secondary education (Spain). The instrument used presents good psychometric attributes, emphasizing the balanced characterization, considering that the number of students is similar (51%, 49%), the confidentiality and the validity. Finally, a KMO higher than 0.9 indicates high reliability in the consistency of the instrument used.
Highlights
The emergence in the 21st century of the new pedagogical concept of competencies represented a new challenge and impetus for the concept of educational evaluation
All of these legislative changes show the need to develop evaluation systems that gather information on the three types of content and the mobilization of these contents in an adequate way, through the approach of true situations that require students to solve real problems, in which they can apply their knowledge in a creative way [2]. It requires the use of a wide range of assessment test formats that help to verify complex thinking or problem-solving skills during and at the end of the process [3]. These assessment tests are already being designed in other European countries and have proven to be effective in detecting what historical and geographic thinking skills students have, and how far they have progressed in acquiring competencies in subjects such as social sciences in secondary education
On this basis, each factor relates—directly or indirectly—to the students’ perception of the acquisition of these competences based on knowledge, facts, or situations that occur in the classroom
Summary
The emergence in the 21st century of the new pedagogical concept of competencies represented a new challenge and impetus for the concept of educational evaluation In this sense, there is a need to educate in competences, since—among other aspects—it favors interdisciplinarity with the rest of the subjects as is the case of language teaching. In Spain, these competencies have become integral elements of the curriculum both in the Organic Law on Education (OLE) and in the Organic Law on the Improvement and Quality of Education (OLIQUE) All of these legislative changes show the need to develop evaluation systems that gather information on the three types of content (concepts, procedures, and attitudes) and the mobilization of these contents in an adequate way, through the approach of true situations that require students to solve real problems, in which they can apply their knowledge in a creative way [2]. These assessment tests are already being designed in other European countries and have proven to be effective in detecting what historical and geographic thinking skills students have, and how far they have progressed in acquiring competencies in subjects such as social sciences in secondary education
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