Planned, Taught, Learnt: Analysis Of Transversal Skills Through Curriculum Using Portfolio

There is an everlasting effort in education to successfully ensure that the intended learning objectives are clearly taught and effectively learnt at the end of the educational cycle. This has been especially difficult in teaching and learning complex sets of competencies, for example, transversal skills in domains such as engineering education. Yet, studies focusing on transversal skills often address student learning outcomes, but rarely how teachers teach them, and even less so how they are represented in the written curriculum. In order to create a more comprehensive understanding of how transversal skills are communicated, taught and learnt in engineering education, we designed a qualitative case study with a focus on teaching and learning transversal skills. The data was collected from five distinct sources within one master course. This included examining the written curriculum as presented in the course syllabus, the taught curriculum with data from the teacher interview and teaching materials, and the learnt curriculum coded from student portfolios. In our results, we reflect on alignments, gaps and potentials in teaching and learning transversal skills. Alongside, through our case we argue that alignment in learning intentions and outcomes is stronger due to using a training portfolio and explicitly requiring reflection as part of the assessment, which does not prevent other learning outcomes from evolving spontaneously. We also discuss suggestions for portfolio design and its use in teaching and learning transversal skills in engineering education.