Abstract:

The way of teaching at the university has undergone notable changes in recent years, and one of its main objectives is the development of teaching strategies focused on student learning. The student becomes the true axis of university education, while the teacher is a mediator or guide.

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an educational model that uses a set of activities around a situation or problem so that the students learn to search, analyse, and use the collected information and therefore integrate the knowledge. It focuses on the student and guides learning towards “learning to learn”.

The PBL is proposed as a means for students to acquire that knowledge and apply it to solve a real or fictitious problem, without the classic teacher using the lecture or another traditional method to transmit that knowledge. Its objective is to stimulate, in the student, the desire to know, and, in addition, it favours teamwork. This is very useful in situations where learning difficulties are partially attributed to a lack of interest and motivation.

The purpose of this manuscript is to implement a model of methodological structure focused on the ability to solve problems from real situations through the development of specific skills such as group work, which improves the student's ability to interact and helps them.

The experience was carried out in the second semester of the 2018/19 and 2019/20 courses, during the development of the Chemistry subject of the Electrical Engineering degree, first-year subject.

They were proposed to design a project that would allow us to know if the olive oil we consume is in accordance with the indicated quality. The methodology to be used would have to be in accordance with the available instrumentation in the laboratory. Once the teacher approves the script that the students have developed, they are given a series of oil samples (4 or 5) of a certain declared quality and they have been asked to determine if it was in accordance with that quality. For that, the students had to follow the European Regulation that standardizes the determination of quality and purity of an oil through routes, and in the UNE / ISO standards corresponding to each analysis.

To carry out this research, the students were grouped into groups of no more than 3 people. This activity had a development time of one week, the week before the implementation of the developed work. The carried-out work will be tutored and guided, so that at the end of the week all the groups will have what is called a practical script to be able to apply this methodology to the study of a series of oil samples in laboratory.

The qualitative results have been very satisfactory and coincide with those of other experiences in which the PBL methodology has been applied to improve the teaching-learning process.

Keywords:

Problem based learning, Chemistry, Motivation