Assessment and development of professional competencies in higher education: A student perspective from the social sciences

Abstract

This study analyses students' perceptions of multimodal assessment activities in Social Sciences courses participating in the IDEC-Pro Project at Universidad de la Cuenca del Plata, Argentina. The article reports the student phase of a broader educational action research project and focuses on whether students experienced assessment as oriented toward professional competency development. A structured mixed-format questionnaire was administered to 287 undergraduate students from four Social Sciences degree programmes, across different campuses and teaching modalities. The questionnaire combined Likert-scale items, dichotomous questions, categorical variables, open-ended prompts, and academic performance data appended from institutional records. The analysis focused on students' overall satisfaction with assessment, perceived integration of theoretical, practical and experiential learning, academic performance, and the reflective function of the questionnaire. Quantitative data were analysed using Jamovi, including descriptive statistics, correlations, and exploratory regression models, while semi-open responses were examined through thematic coding. The findings show high satisfaction with assessment, positive perceptions of learning integration, and good academic performance. Qualitative results indicate that students associated assessment activities with conceptual understanding, practical application, professional role construction, collaborative work, and reflection on the assessment process. The triangulated profile analysis suggests that assessment was broadly experienced as competency-oriented, although not uniformly across all students. The study concludes that students perceived the analysed assessment activities as meaningfully oriented toward professional competency development, while also highlighting the need for subsequent analysis of task quality, criteria, feedback, and evidence requirements.