A TUTORIAL ACTION PLAN IN THE OPINION OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The new Degrees of official teaching university in Spain (Royal Decree 1393/2007 of 29 October), [Real Decreto 1393/2007, de 29 de octubre] require the existence of "Systems of support and guidance available to students once enrolled." At the University of Burgos (UBU) in the 2009-2010 academic year began implementing a University Tutorial Action Plan (TAP) in the new degree. This Plan has been generalized to all undergraduate degrees from 2010-2011.
The authors of this paper, belonging to Grupo Innovación Docente University Tutorship (GIDUT) of the UBU, have studied different aspects related to the TAP since its implantation. In this work we present the results of surveys, applied during 2011-2012 academic year, designed to study the evolution of the TAP from the students’ point of view. The survey includes 9 items related with the students’ personal implication in the TAP and 7 related with their evaluation of their tutor and the TAP.
In order to know the evolution of TAP, we selected a sample between students. The respondents belong to two different levels of studies: students from the first year and students from higher levels. The first one belongs to the degree in Chemistry and the others are from the third year of the degree Food Science Technology.
The evaluation of the results we can say that there are still things to improve on the TAP, because almost half of the students from the first year haven´t attended any tutorship, while more than 2/3 of the students from the third year have been using it. We also found that in both groups, less than 50% students filled the questionnaires related to the TAP.
As positive results, we note that 56% of the students from the third year claim they should recommend the TAP to others students, because they find them very useful, in particular related with the resolution of academic issues and the professional guidance, but only 13% of the students from the first course should do the same.
Finally, the Group has presented a set of proposals for improving the PAT for use in later courses.