Abstract:

Higher education teaching may be improved by evidence-based methodologies, in order to provide a greater learning quality for our students. At this regard, some successful evidence-based educational actions were conducted in Psychology’s degree. The educational action called "Applied research methods" was implemented in the subject Developmental Psychology during the first semester of the academic year 2016/2017, as a practice in the issue about Cognitive skills development. This practice was expected to develop the specific competences number 3, i.e., to know the basic foundations of the different psychological processes, and number 6, i.e., to know the main processes and stages of psychological development throughout the life cycle in its aspects of normality and abnormality. This practice was entitled “Observational experiment on cognitive development during childhood”, and consisted of carrying out, in groups of 5-6 students, three Piagetian experiments with a sample of 4 children, aged between 3 and 8 years old. Specifically, students were proposed to perform the experiments with one girl or one boy from these specific age periods: 3-4 years old, 4-5 years old, 5-6 years old, and 7-8 years old. Children were invited to participate in two experiments of Conservation Tasks (both liquid and mass) and an experiment of Classification Task. The procedure of these experiments followed the instructions provided by Piaget. On the basis of the Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, students should then analyze the characteristics of the child reasoning by age and differentiate between the pre-operational stage and the concrete operational stage. Finally, these research works conducted by students were presented in class as a poster presentation, an oral communication or a brief manuscript, as each group of students preferred. All these presentations were integrated within the Students' Conference on Developmental Psychology, celebrated at the end of the semester. APA style was respected for citation, reference and structure. This educational action was very useful and effective to teach the contents related with child cognitive development, and it was also highly valued by students. This practice allowed a more active way of learning and provided a direct contact with the children's mind. Results from the satisfaction survey in the university indicated excellent scores in learning resources, organization, understanding and motivation, as well as high punctuations in satisfaction with teaching work.

Keywords:

Higher education, teaching, learning, evidence-based, experience, innovation, psychology degree.