SELF-CONFIDENCE AS A NEW COMPETENCE TO ASSESS IN HIGHER EDUCATION PROGRAMS

This work derives from the educational improvement project provided by the UJI to the Group of Educational Innovation in Basic Legal Sciences "docendo discimus" during the call for the academic year 2012-2013 with title: Building your own knowledge in basic legal science. How would you rate yourself? The project starts with the aim of solving several problems identified in previous implementations conducted by the team of the UJI and members of Grup d'Innovation Docent at the University of Barcelona 2011 "Dret privat". We refer in particular to the considerable mistrust and insecurity of the students with regards to acquiring knowledge and managing the learning process. That is why the task force proposed not to look only for the root cause of this missing confidence, but tried to take a step further to explore what could be done to encourage the self-assurance of the students in the learning process, and even, why not?, assess the suitability of proposing and defining a new competence to be evaluated: self-confidence. Based on this, one of the objectives set to the project is to obtain information for comprehensive scrutiny in order to unveil and fully investigate the causes of the lack of confidence in managing their own learning process. The aim is to propose solutions that mitigate this lack of self-confidence and verifying their efficiency in improving academic performance rates or, at least, closing the gap between the qualifications expected and the ones actually obtained. The project has been implemented following a phased approach, from which we highlight the following learning activity: Designing a controversial supposition from current sources and facing the challenge of rolling back a solution to the parameters provided by basic Legal Sciences. This activity, carried out from beginning to end by the students, has been self-assessed, so that students have been able to verify their degree of self-confidence and their own knowledge management. The activity has enabled to endow the students with tools and skills like self-confidence, perseverance, dedication, fair valuation of their own limitations and the ability to propose actions to overcome them, and even self-esteem. Two surveys, one before and one after the activity proposed have been performed to verify the data obtained and evaluate the activity itself. The analysis of the results (last phase of the project) will help us to determine the strengths and the weaknesses in management and self-knowledge, as well as to verify significant differences between the degree of confidence before and after fulfilling the learning activity.