Abstract:

This communication describes the work developed at Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) for the last two years by a team of lecturers called GRIPAU (Interdisciplinary Group for University Education Learning). GRIPAU is an interdisciplinary group of nine lecturers whose research is based on promoting innovation and improvement of learning quality in higher education. The main objective of GRIPAU is to develop new active methods to increase student’s motivation, and to favour student’s effective learning.

In 2010, in the framework of this group, it was identified that students in higher education tend to fail in developing an authentic and effective learning. It was also observed that students do not think about the way they are learning, and this lack of reflection generates a lack of motivation towards the learning process. According to this scenario, GRIPAU decided to conduct different experiences focused on developing active learning methodologies to promote the significant learning of the students. As a result, a common strategy with support of ICTs (Information and Communication Technology) was developed and applied to different areas of knowledge under an institutional Innovation Project entitled “The student’s reflection as an efficient strategy to promote effective learning”. The overall perception of the lectures involved in this project was that the common methodology applied had been a real success, promoting the reflection of students and its autonomous work.

Next, GRIPAU took a step forward on his career developing the educational innovation described in this communication, entitled “Development of emotional strategies to promote the students excellence”. The ambitious objective of this strategy is to promote excellent learning and the integral development of students. An excellent learning may be defined not only considering theoretical contents, but also the development of certain skills, sensitization with their environment or development of critical thinking. To this aim, a series of specific cognitive and emotional strategies have been defined in order to potentially enhance this learning. These strategies have been applied in eight subjects belonging to very different areas of knowledge, such as Telecommunication, Biotechnology, Physics, Fine Arts, Civil Engineering, or Agricultural Engineering, and evaluated using a common methodology consisting in surveys to students at the beginning and at the end of the course. In general, the methodologies used in this study were positively rated by students and a tendency to improve the development of certain cross competences was detected, demonstrating that enhancing student’s reflection on his own learning is an effective strategy to motivate students and to promote an excellent learning. In this work detailed information about the approach followed in this educational research is provided.Moreover, results and systematic evidences are presented in order to demonstrate the success of the proposed methodology.

Keywords:

Higher education, effective learning, excellence, motivation, skills, autonomous work.