Abstract:

The Higher Professional Technical Courses (CTeSP) are short training courses, with a strong practical and professional approach, taught exclusively in the higher education polytechnic schools. One of the goals of this training typology is to educate specialized technicians, with competence necessary for the immediate entry into the labour market, promoting a close articulation between higher education and the professional requirements.

Due to the nature of these courses and the students’ profile, most of them in superior professional education, it is fundamental to resort to active learning methodologies that make students active agents of their learning, promoting the development of integral written and oral communication skills in different contexts. Therefore, these should include collaborative work activities that promote critical thinking, problem solving, flexibility and active learning, skills that will be valued by employers by 2025, according to The Future of Jobs Report 2020, produced by the World Economic Forum (October 2020).

The scope of the study is to evaluate the impact that these learning goals, adopted in the context of the course of Oral and Written Expression Techniques in Portuguese, in three CTeSP, provided at the School of Technology and Management of Águeda, University of Aveiro (Portugal), in the motivation and active learning of the students. In this article you will be presented four pedagogies adopted by us (collaborative work, turn-around room, online interactions and weekly challenges), based on the didactic approach to active learning. You will also be informed about the goals to be achieved and the competences to be developed.

The data obtained through the application of an online questionnaire survey to students, in the end of the semester, will be complemented by the results of their school performance, with a success rate of 75%. In addition to that, there will be an added value which regards the use of interactive technological tools in the classroom, student preference for multimedia materials and for autonomous study and the advantages of the weekly challenges as a motivational learning factor. Empathy and ability to interact with students are the most valued attributes in the professor, according to the verified data, in the questionnaires.

In the discussion of the results, it is necessary to diversify the methodologies of learning that increase the motivation, as implied by the theory of self-determination, that values the feedback given by students as a regulatory element of the evaluation and that promotes the aggregation of skills with the technical curricular units of the courses.

Keywords:

Higher Professional Technical Courses, higher education polytechnic schools, Active learning, Oral and Written Expression Techniques in Portuguese, strategies, pedagogies.