Abstract:

Nowadays, engineers have an important role in our society and their professional careers can end in positions of high responsibility, both civil and environmental. For that, their formation process has to be carefully developed and the correct planning and coordination both at a horizontal level, between professors of the same subject, and at a vertical level, between professors from the same department, and at a transversal level, between professors of the same group, is mandatory.

This work is focused on the analysis of the satisfaction level of the learning for the students of the Degrees in Chemical Engineering (CE), Engineering of Industrial Technologies (EIT), Engineering of the Energy (EE) and Engineering in Industrial Organization (EIO) at University of Malaga. In particular, difficulties were found by the first-year students in relation to required previous knowledge, overlapping of contents and lack of coordination among the different professors.

First, a representative group of students for each degree was interviewed in order to find out some aspects of the conditions of access to the University, such as their corresponding marks and the modality of the bachelor studied. As far as the degree is concerned, the students answered to several questions regarding the possible presence of content duplicities and the need of previous knowledge required to complete the different subjects, from two different points of view: contents acquired in their bachelor or contents which must be learnt along the degree in other subjects.

Some coordination indicators were established in order to easily identify the subjects that require improvements in their coordination and/or previous knowledge. The curricular guidelines and the coordination between the professors have been reviewed and/or modified as long as one of these items becomes true:
i) More than 60% of the students think that the acquisition of some items (previous knowledge) must be earlier introduced to pass the course
ii) More than 60% of the students think that there are duplicities among two or more subjects.

Around 100 students of the different degrees participated in the surveys and some conclusions were obtained. Most of them comes from the technological bachelor with marks higher than 7/10, excepting for CE degree, whose students have mainly studied the modality of natural and health sciences. The former students found difficulties in Chemistry, due to the lack of previous knowledge derived from the modality of bachelor studied, and overall in Calculus and Algebra, due to the need of contents not previously studied. On the other hand, more than 50% of students from CE and EE degrees appreciated duplicities between two subjects. After that, the curricular guidelines were reviewed and, effectively, some duplicity of content was detected in the revision of the guides, in agreement with the information derived from the coordination indicators.

The results suggest that some minor although relevant changes in the temporary schedule of the contents of mostly all the evaluated degrees are necessary in order to provide information previously required in other subjects; some curricular guidelines must be modified to avoid duplicities, overall in CE degree; and it would be desirable to offer preparatory courses for students who have coursed other modalities of bachelor and have not possessed appropriate knowledge.

Keywords:

Enhancing learning, undergraduate student, previous knowledge.