STUDENT SATISFACTION WITH THE UNIVERSITY ORIENTATION PROGRAM OF THE FACULTY OF EDUCATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ZARAGOZA

The “University Orientation Program” (in Spanish, Plan de Orientación Universitaria –POU-) of the University of Zaragoza (UZ) is a plan that promotes the integration of new students into the academic context. This integration could determine students’ personal, intellectual and academic development while they study undergraduate degrees. Hence POU’s quality is a necessary condition and forms part of the responsibility of the different academic agents involved. During the last academic year (2016-2017), POU underwent some changes in our faculty to promote improvements in the orientation process that are related with better tutoring task specifications (more specific psycho-educational materials and resources are used), and better adjusted and specified tutoring activity planning. Tutors’ efforts to measure student satisfaction of POU after its implementation, by considering POU to be adjusted to students’ requirements, could play an essential role to ensure the ideal conditions for POU’s adequacy. We aimed to analyze student satisfaction based on a selective methodology after implementing POU at the UZ’s Faculty of Education to determine POU’s adequacy for our faculty, but also for other faculties and universities.

In this study we ran a descriptive analysis of the data obtained with a 19-item questionnaire devised ad hoc, which was completed by 150 students studying the university degrees of Nursery School Education and Primary Education (gender: male= 20.70%, female= 79.30%). The instrument included items to learn students’ agreement with statements about POU’s objective being fulfilled: integration, socialization, knowledge of the faculty’s services and infrastructure, knowledge of the academic curriculum, personal time management and subjects/courses coping.

The results showed that 47.9% of the students agreed with the statement about POU allowing integration into the faculty, and 46.3% agreed that POU facilitated peer relationships. Regarding knowledge of the faculty’s services and infrastructure, 59.8% stated that they received good orientation to help them know their faculty. In academic terms, 65%, 48.7% and 55.40% of the students agreed that the program offered help them know how to cope with subjects, know how to manage personal time and learn the academic curriculum, respectively. Only 13.3% of the students were unsatisfied with POU.

Generally speaking, the data revealed that POU responds to some student demands, with promising results that support the need to continue implementing such programs. It is important that our universities make efforts to institutionalize orientation programs to advise students with a view to promoting their integral development.