Visualization of Competence through Cooperative Education at NIT, Anan College

We determined six upper-level skills regarding competency in the Model Core Curriculum of the National Institutes of Technology using a company survey due to the difficulties of developing and evaluating many skills at one time. These six skills are “communication”, “teamwork skill”, “independence”, “sense of responsibility”, “discovering problems”, and “logical thinking”. We also created a rubric for each skill and used it to evaluate students. In the trial evaluation, student self-evaluation and mutual evaluation, as well as faculty evaluation were carried out. From these results, self-evaluation of students is found to be effective as a sustainable evaluation while avoiding increasing the burden on students. We studied the improvement of student competency by self-evaluation before and after the "cooperative education," which is a kind of Project Based Learning compulsory subject. The National Institutes of Technology have an integrated five-year program. After finishing cooperative education, we asked the students about their sense of improvement related to competence. The results of each skill show that there are many students who provided an overall evaluation of a sense of improvement. For all skills, we estimate that more than 80% of students have evaluated "successful", and they can infer through the practical training that they were able to capture the opportunities for success using their skills. Students were also asked about their improvement of skills. Prior to the start of the project, neither faculty members nor students were conscious of competency acquisition, development and visualization, but they gradually became conscious of it through using the rubric.