Assessment of students’ learning outcomes in the EHEA: their practices, preferences and evolution

Abstract

The European Higher Education Area implies, at least theoretically, substantial changes in the developed educational approaches specified in several areas. Among these the assessment of students’ learning is the focus of this article. The approaches and results that are exposed here are framed in an Educational Research Project entitled “Learning approaches of the university students, teaching strategies and institutional contexts to the beginning, half and end of career in the process of implantation of the new degrees”. Specifically, we focus on the learning assessment, analyzing both the formats or modalities of this kind of evaluation as well as the preferences which the students have concerning them in the context of different courses and university degrees. Furthermore, we try to somewhat clarify how these preferences could vary depending on the learning approach of each student (deep or superficial) and, also, on the students' evolution along the different courses of their degree.