Evidence of Students Meeting the Learning Objectives
The interest of students was measured by their rate of presence
and active participation. Deriving from the problem-centered orientation of the
course, the activation of students was regarded as a very important mean of
achieving our learning objectives. As indicators
of problem-specific student understanding we used criteria such as: number/quality/originality
of problems/questions raised during the classroom discussions, number/quality/originality
of the solutions offered.
As we used mostly the method
of team-discussion, there was also a possibility to assess the ability of
students to work in team and to reach creative solutions in short time by brain-storming.
Team work was also used as method of activating students in the classroom and making
them to focus their attention on a specific task.
For the development of long
term transferable skills, the most important method of assessment was the
assignment of final papers (projects) dealing with particular aspects of local/regional
development or cross-border cooperation. The grading of papers/projects took
into account the relevance of the researched problem, theoretical and
methodological coherence, originality/applicability of the proposed solutions,
the potential and willingness of the student to work further on the same thematic
field.