An adaptive methodology for curriculum redesign based on performance indicators of the student progression

ABSTRACT

We propose an adaptive methodology for the curricular redesign based on the performance indicators of the student progression observed after a follow-up period. The feasibility of adopting the same approach should be thoroughly studied to assess its compatibility with institutions and countries that employ an academic credit system based on student workload, such as the European Credit Transfer System. This approach was applied here for the Chilean system, which is highly consistent with the European case. The resulting methods can be automated and integrated into institutional databases for the management of teaching-learning processes to enhance decision-making. Special attention is devoted to the methods for estimating the credit points and the relative position of each course in the curriculum sequence chart of a university degree. As an example of application, we discuss the curriculum redesign of the B.Sc. degree in Physics offered by the Universidad Católica del Norte. The analysis is based on the statistical report of performance indicators of this undergraduate program during the follow-up period 2015–2019 (five years). We report a certain correspondence between the problem of credit allocation and the behavior in the student progression, which represents an empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the associated credit points estimation.

KEYWORDS:

• Student workload
• performance indicators
• curriculum design
• institutional databases
• quantitative methods

Acknowledgments

Authors thanks Arancibia-Carvajal and Guevara Baldelomar for their support concerning the SCT-Chile system, as well as by their many valuable suggestions since the early development of this research. We also thank Bahoz-Mamani for the technical support with the statistical databases.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 SCT-Chile is the trademark registered by the Council of Rectors of Chilean universities to designate their model of academic credit system. It was promoted by the Tuning Latin America project developed between 2004 and 2007 (Beneitone et al. 2007) The SCT credits are compatible with ECTS credits: 1 SCT ≡ 24–31 working hours, while 1 ECTS ≡ 25–30 working hours.

2 There exist exceptional situations where the cumulative distribution of final grades exhibits a sensible deviation from the empirical profile shown in Figure 4. These cases can be explained by the failure of some of the conditions (1)–(3) previously commented: (i) when the course's implementation considered a very low number of partial evaluations, (ii) when the assessments do not appear as independent tests (assessment biases), (iii) when the partial grades aren't random (another form of assessment biases since they were assigned without considering a rigorous evaluation guideline), (iv) when the final grades of different students are not independent (they do not reflect the individual learning of the students), (v) when the lecturers of some courses remain without rotation an unreasonable number of academic periods and the same evaluations already applied in precedent periods are repeated (and the students know their resolutions), among others. The institutional teaching regulations and associated protocols should supervise and avoid these implementation problems.

3 In general, the academic performance of students is strongly correlated to their respective university degrees (since different study plans attract different type of students). For this reason, this Chilean teaching regulation unable the specific attention for students neediness of different university degrees.

4 In the official website of Physics degree of the Universitat de Barcelona (2022), it is declared a total 240 ECTS credits. However, our proper analysis of the reported information yields a total of 210 ECTS credits. The existing inconsistency is that the elective courses comprise a total of 60 credits instead of the 90 declared in the summary of the study plan. Since elective courses also range among 3, 6, and 9 credits, the total number of courses enrolled by each student ranges from 8 to 12, with a mean of 10 courses, which is the value reported in the data-sheet of Figure 8.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been partially funded by Universidad Católica del Norte (Chile) [research project DGPRE 40/2021].