Abstract:

Higher education teaching should take advantage from the evidence-based methodologies, in order to provide a higher learning quality for our undergraduates. Thus, some successful educational actions were implemented in the degree in Psychology aimed to perform the most supported procedures by educational research. In the subject Developmental Psychology, the action called "Applied research methods" was implemented during the first semester of the academic year 2016/2017, as a practical activity in the issue about Social and Emotional Skills development. This practice was hypothesized to develop two specific competences: the competence number 3, i.e., to know the basic foundations of the different psychological processes and the competence 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 “A qualitative study on social and emotional development during childhood”. In this practice, the students were invited, in groups of 5-6 members, to perform four semi-structured interviews to four children, aged from 6 to 11 years old. Specifically, students were proposed to interview one girl and one boy from these specific age periods: 6-8 years old, and 9-11 years old. The semi-structured interview was composed of the several questions organized in several topics, selected following the interests of each group, such as self-esteem and its roots, self-concept, personal relationships with parents and friends, basic and social emotions, well-being and emotional regulation, and leisure time and vital project. After transcribing all the interviews, students qualitatively analyzed the responses for each question in each topic by the participating children, in order to make a comparison by age and gender. The differences reported were explained on the basis of the recent theories of social and emotional development from childhood to adolescence. Moreover, the students were also invited to design a preliminary intervention, following the conclusions of their research work, to foster self-esteem and well-being in children. Concerning the presentation of the research works, they were presented in class as a poster presentation, an oral communication or a brief manuscript (following APA style), as each group of students preferred, within the Students' Conference on Developmental Psychology, celebrated at the end of the semester. The performance of this educational action was proved to be effective to teach the contents related with social and emotional development. Moreover, it was highly valued by students, who consider this practice as a more active way of learning, by providing a direct contact with the children's life. Results from the satisfaction enquiries performed by university revealed high mean scores in learning resources, organization, understanding, and motivation. High scores were also observed in overall satisfaction with teaching work.

Keywords:

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