Final Report Pilot Project - Relaciones Internacionales de la ...

Physics Network. They relied on some mission statements at institutional
level (available through previous work made within EUPEN 2 network), on
sets of educational aims/objectives as stated in some member states
(either by law or by regulating agencies) and —finally— on their own
experience. The competence list was finalised at the EUPEN Steering
Committee held in Namur (January 2002) and then sent out by the
Tuning general co-ordinators, according to a procedure, which was
common to all the seven Tuning subjects. As a whole we got 121 returns
from 13 institutions out of 14; the number of returns per institutions
ranged from a minimum of 2 to a maximum of 20. We remind here that
the Tuning Physics Group/Network consisted of representatives from
14 universities in 13 countries, all of them committed not only in coursework
teaching and in learning by students, but also in physics research
and in research training of young scientists, as truly qualifying aspects of
their own mission.
The results for the specific competences in Physics —as evaluated
by the Physics Academics, on a scale from 1 to 4— are shown in
Table 1. Looking at Table 1, we see —first of all— that the «rating
value» for the importance of a given 2 nd cycle competence is always
higher than the value for the same competence in the 1 st cycle, the
average difference (or «gap») among the two sets of values being
0.712 (see also Table 4 below). This gap reveals that the Academics
perceive clearly the difference between the two cycles; its sign (i.e. a
positive gap) might generally indicate that the 2 nd cycle is supposed to
enhance what already achieved, maybe only partially, in the 1 st cycle.
In short, the development of competences is a cumulative process.
See also below.
A second remark concerns the variation range of the rating
values over the competences. The variation ranges are 1.46 and
1.25, in the 1 st and 2 nd cycle respectively; they are definitely larger
than the observed standard deviations. Having divided the variation
range into three intervals of equal length (0.49 and 0.42 respectively),
it is then meaningful to group the values into three categories (high,
intermediate, low importance) depending on whether the actual
value falls within the upper, middle or lower interval of the variation
range.
2 EUPEN (EUropean Physics Education Network) is a Socrates Thematic Network and
can rightly be considered as the mother of the present Tuning Network.
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