Abstract

Transversal competences such as sustainability or critical thinking have become more important in the last decades in University teaching. The objective of this article is to assess the effectiveness of debate as a teaching method capable of fostering such competences in engineering students. To do this, a debate activity has been held facing two reasonable positions: Sustainable Development versus Degrowth. The research methodology consisted of performing this activity in the classroom (with 13 students in this particular case study), and conducting some tests before and after the debate that served as feedback to assess the effectiveness of the debate on the learning process. This feedback is composed of different documents, including a pre-post test, a specific survey about the debate, a pre-post knowledge survey and the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ) survey. A methodology for the organization of the debate is proposed and the answers of the students to these feedback documents are analyzed. As it can be inferred from the different surveys, the debate has been an efficient learning tool to acquire knowledge and to develop sustainability and critical thinking competences.

Highlights

  • IntroductionTransversal competences became more important in the last decades in education policy documents [1,2], including higher education [3]

  • These transversal competences include, among others, critical thinking, sustainability and teamwork [4]. How to develop these transversal competences and, at the same time, comply with the specific competences of each subject has been a recurrent objective in higher education [3,5,6]

  • The objective of this article is to assess the effectiveness of debate as a teaching method capable of fostering sustainability and critical thinking competences in engineering students

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Summary

Introduction

Transversal competences became more important in the last decades in education policy documents [1,2], including higher education [3]. These transversal competences include, among others, critical thinking, sustainability and teamwork [4]. Debate presentation and basic aspects of CT SD defense SD team. Statement of arguments in defense of SD D defense D team. Statement of arguments in defense of D Preparation All. Preparation of the second part of the debate

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