Abstract:

In the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), activities based on competences are one of most used methodology and analyse the student’s satisfaction with these activities can help to lecturers to know which is the degree of achievement of the competences and skills related with each activity. In this paper we analyse students’ real perceptions and students’ expectations with activities developed in Business Management subjects in the academic course 201/2013. The difference between these two variables (perceptions and expectations) is the students’ satisfaction with these activities. The subjects analysed are Introduction to Business Management, a subject of the first course of the Degree on Financial and Accounting at the University of Valencia, and International Business Management, a subject of the third course of the Degree on Business Management in the same university. More precisely, this study has three objectives. First, examine the competences’ activities used in different Business Management subjects. Second, to study the students’ real perceptions and students’ expectations with each activity developed in the subject. Third, analyse the students’ satisfaction degree with the activities. To achieve these objectives, we present the results of a survey carried out on a sample of students of both subjects during the course examined. The results of the paper show that the real perceptions of the students with competences’ activities could be different to their expectations. The satisfaction degree is lower when student’s expectations are higher. The lecturers could offer more information to the students about the competences and skills associated to each activity, to try to reduce their expectations and to achieve higher levels of satisfaction.

Keywords:

Students’ satisfaction, competences, perceptions, Business Management, EHEA, experiences.