Generic Skills Assessment Through Implementation of Group Based Learning to Understand SDGs

Abstract

In this competitive world, it is important for students to acquire generic skills and its assessment in higher education is scarce. This study is an attempt to address the effect of group based learning on generic skills development and and also an approach to spread the knowledge of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Like generic skills, educating young students about SDGs has become crucial. A workshop was conducted for 3 days and a total of 12 students filled in the questionnaire for group and self assessment of generic skills for 10 selected generic skills after every workshop. The overall results indicated that the group based learning have positive impact on the development of generic skills. We found that all generic skills were more developed in group assessment than individual assessment. When the inter-relationship among the skills were assessed for individual ratings using network analysis, the results revealed that the effective team work was strongly associated with co-operativity (r² =0.7529 p <0.001), communication (r² =0.7146, p <0.001) and information sharing (r² =0.7529 p <0.001). The significant finding of this study is the use of shared educational materials which helped the students to overcome the language barrier and be more interactive to achieve the given goal. Further, this study has explored the application of group based learning as an effective educational approach to introduce any designed studies (in this case, SDGs) for fostering the innovative human resources belonging to different educational backgrounds. Moreover, this study also emphasizes on the importance of teaching SDGs to the engineering students for their capacity building, so that they not only understand but also act to ensure that the goals are met for better future.

Keywords: Engineering students, Generic skills, Group based learning, Self assessment, Group Assessment Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).