Supervising and Assessing Team Projects. Some experiences in Econometrics

Resumen

In the context of the Economics and Business degrees, Econometrics provide a wide variety of toolswhich appear to be narrowly related to several main competences such as information management,creativity, problem solving or decision-making. Furthermore, the need of analyzing and interpreting thefunctioning of the economy suggests the convenience of learning Econometrics by doingEconometrics.Team projects play a main role in the teaching-learning process, since they allow students cooperatingin the development of econometric models, taking benefit from econometric software and ICT facilities,and also improving their ability to work in team, as suggested by employers. Moreover, from theteachers´ perspective, the development of team projects represents a good opportunity to reexaminesome methodological aspects, also opening new challenges in the management and assessment ofthe projects.In this paper we summarize our experiences in supervising Econometrics team projects for more thana decade, describing the main pedagogical and organizational decisions. According to the availableinformation (based both on objective statistics and online students´ surveys) we confirm somestrengths of the experience (such as the use of Gretl, the virtual campus, the continuous assessmentor the oral presentation) but also some weaknesses, mainly referred to organizational aspects and theimprovement of critical and self-critical ability.