Abstract:

At the Polytechnic School in Donostia-San Sebastian, University of the Basque Country, the teaching staff of the Industrial Engineering: Industrial Chemistry have been carried out in a gradual and voluntary way experimentations on subjects’ adaptation and integration within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The aim of this paper is to present activities in the subject of Experimentation in Chemistry I. The main objective of the teaching-learning process is to guide the acquisition of students of generic and specific competences of this subject, expanding the traditional approach based on contents and attending hours.
Students access to the subject teaching guide where objectives, teaching methodology, planning of practice realization, the subject program, evaluation criteria and bibliography are set out through the virtual campus of the UPV/EHU either via the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project or through the Moodle platform.
The activities planned for the acquisition of the subjects' competences are:
• Seminars for bibliography search, objectives, planning and implementation of experimental procedures scheduled in the Experimentation in Chemistry I subject, encouraging reflection through teamwork and energizing the teacher-student interaction.
• Experimental sessions of practice realization in the laboratory. Before practice realization, students will develop an experimental procedure with the information obtained in the bibliography search, knowledge acquired in theoretical subjects of Chemical Engineering and advice from the teacher. After practice realization, students should prepare and present a practice report which is done using scientific language reflecting the obtained results and their interpretation.
• Oral presentations, both individual and collective, of the work developed in the seminars and in the experimental sessions.
Experience indicates that this methodology allows planning the teaching-learning process and encourages reflection and research of teaching staff and evaluate and tutoring the students during the subject learning with the aim so that students integrate knowledge, competences and attitudes.

Keywords:

New methodologies, teaching-learning process, experimentation in chemistry.