Final Report Pilot Project - Phase 1

ANNEX IIThe Common Core Content of 52 Physics Institutionsi.e. the «credit core contents» as yieldedby the EUPEN 1 2001 Consultation1. The «Common Core Content»While the Tuning Pilot Project was evolving, it became clearer andclearer that some of the results 2 shown at the EUPEN General Forum inKöln (September 2001) were quite meaningful with respect to theissues raised within the Tuning Line 2 - Subject specific competences(Knowledge and Skills). The approach illustrated here is based oninduction, i.e. on concrete cases, and it is in a way complementary tothe approach described by the Business Group (see Document 3 ofTuning, blue pages, paper WP3.2.1 Business).We start from the following operational definition of the corecontent, among the several possible ones (as discussed in the maintext 3 ). When reference is made to the degree courses of a givensubject in a given ensemble of countries (e.g. EU, the Europeancountries, etc), it is appropriate to speak about the common corecontent, i.e. the set of the course units/activities which are commonto all the degree courses having possibly the same or similar nameand/or similar learning outcomes. Of course, in order to produce aquantitative (statistical) description, the course units/activities mustbe characterised by a number (the ECTS credits in our case) and by alabel, which broadly identifies their content and possibly their level(in our case the we identified 11 such labels, as seen in the referencegrid, Table I below).The present results are based on the returns to that part of theEUPEN 2001 questionnaire, which asked for the distribution —over apre-defined reference grid (see Table I)— of the credits allocated to theunits/activities, which are offered in each answering institution in thefirst two cycles (the doctoral studies were never considered in thisstudy). All the answering institutions adopted either ECTS credits (89 %of the EUPEN whole 2001 sample) or nationally defined credits, whose1EUPEN, i.e. EUropean Physics Education Network, is a TNP funded under Socrates-Erasmus by the European Commission.2See Ref. [1].3See §C of the main text.202