Heatmapping PBL Competence Profiles

All educations at the Faculty of Engineering and Science (ENG) and The Technical Faculty of IT and Design (TECH) currently undergo a Competence workshop at their 8th semester in which, an active reflection process over which PBL competences they want to communicate when searching for a job/internship is required and documented in a competence profile, the students must hand in to attend their project exam. To help students in this process a catalogue of different PBL competences divided in four areas; metareflective, problem-oriented, interpersonal, and structural is provided for the students. Each of these areas have 12 competences embedded in them, and the students are asked to choose 1 or 2 from each area.

The aim with the project is to develop a heatmap of the 48 PBL competencies. By measuring the relative frequency with which students report on each of these PBL competencies. These data will potentially identify competencies that are near universal as well as any competencies that are seldom (or indeed never) addressed by students. Furthermore, we might see clusters of competences that more often connect indicating particular profiles among the students. These profiles may be helpful for students to mirror in or for teachers to know of when approaching students.

This work will also allow for differences between different cohorts to be explored and to suggest whether particular educations emphasize particular competencies to their students through their curriculum. This knowledge will allow us to identify competencies that are either neglected or de-emphasized within our curricula, informing future investigations into whether students do not acquire these competencies or simply do not report them.