Abstract:

The adjustment of Catalan Universities to the European Higher Educational Area (EHEA) is nowadays a fact in course and a process that cause a lot of questions of different nature, such as the connection between universities and the labour market, and between knowledge and competencies, or the scope of changes in methodology and teaching culture. To this important change towards a perspective centred on the student another very important aspect must be considered: “the education in competencies”. The student not only has to be trained in the specific competencies of his degree but also it is necessary that he acquires personal competencies for a better incorporation in society, since the aim of the University is not only to train good professionals but also good citizens. The University of Barcelona has defined a number of key competencies considered as essential for the education of any graduate. These key competences are common to all degrees and they have to be included in the whole training process of the student through all his University life. One of these competencies is the “critical and self-critical capacity”. Promoting this type of competency is not easy and implies negotiation and agreement among professors.
The results presented in this work are within the framework of an action-research process in which university professors from different knowledge areas are taking part as the actors. It is an interdisciplinary action-research project that has as an objective to develop strategies and activities to promote the critical and self-critical capacity of students of different degrees, from the reflection of our own educational practice, by using the virtual platform Moodle. We have developed two sets of activities to promote the critical and self-critical capacity of the students:
(1) One group focused on the competences of a subject. We created some critical and self-critical activities to be used at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the teaching process of a subject to see if the student understands the meaning of each subject competence, as well as if they are aware of acquiring these competences during the teaching process.
(2) A second group of critical and self-critical activities to be applied after any other teaching activity or strategy used in a subject (oral expositions, seminars, experimental works, etc.), to help the student to be critical about his own learning process. These activities will be also used as an evaluation method to analyze if the teaching activities used in a subject are good enough or not to acquire the specific competences of the subject.
These activities have been applied to subjects of different degrees of the University of Barcelona (Chemistry, Food Science and Technology, Nursing, Dentistry, and Education degrees).
In the present communication some of these activities, as well as the results obtained after applying them, will be presented and discussed in order to see how to promote the critical and self-critical capacity of the students. The suitability of the activities was evaluated taking into account the answers of the students as well as their opinion about these activities (obtained from personal interviews with them). The learning process of the students and how they are acquiring the specific competencies of a subject can also be discussed by evaluating the results obtained after the application of some of these critical and self-critical activities.

Keywords:

Critical and self-critical capacity, virtual platform moodle.