IS IT NECESSARY A NEW APPROACH TO LEARNING CONTENTS IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT DEGREES? ALCALÁ UNIVERSITY CASE

The demands of adaptation to the European Higher Education Space (Bologna Process), involved the implementation of new university degrees more than five years ago. During these years has a process of change has been conducted, going from knowledge itself to how to acquire and transmit it, that is, to prioritize the development of skills and abilities of the student. Moreover, in the Spanish case, regarding the duration of the degrees we opted for an average period of 4-5 years, depending on the degree as well as an early specialization for the student in their curricular development

The philosophy of this plan was to give students a range of skills that will allow a way to learn independently, but once you have completed a full cycle of new graduates, it is necessary to test whether this philosophy is fulfilled.

In particular, it is proposed an assessment of the students who are in their final years of the degrees of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Alcalá. A sample of approximately 150 students will be considered.

A questionnaire was used to get information from the students. This questionnaire contains a numbers of variables. The questionnaire contains a number of variables that consider the student satisfaction level regarding development and acquisition of knowledge. In particular, they were asked about the usefulness and practicality of acquired content, the shortcomings detected throughout their training and materials or needs they think should be strengthened to achieve a competitive level of job placement. Also consider questions such content (practical and theoretical) and knowledge acquisition along with the ability to implement the acquired skills in internships or in the development of final project.

Among the hypotheses highlights the general perception that students have not really improved their capacity for self-learning and other basic competences, such as the ability of public speaking or developing creativity skills. That is, there may be a lack of adequacy of Spanish studies plans with the understanding university education at European level. Improvement measures will be proposed with the data obtained from the survey, both in content and duration of grades, for the purposes of a future revision of the degrees that the Spanish National Accreditation Agency will out shortly.