USING POSTERS FOR ACTIVE LEARNING IN APPLIED SCIENCE

In recent years, the “Universitat Politècnica de Valencia” (UPV) has been making great efforts to introduce the use of active methodologies in teaching methods. In order to adapt the subject "Management and Conservation of Natural Resources", for the Bachelor Degree in Environmental Sciences, to the European Higher Education Area, different active methodologies have been applied: working in groups, solving problems and posters.

The use of posters lets the development of some of the general skills of the Bachelor Degree in Environmental Sciences, such as teamwork skills, information management abilities and use of the internet as a source of information. The poster activity allows students to increase their knowledge of the teaching units. This tool also allows students to learn to summarize information from a scientific paper in a clear and simple way.

In this activity, the students are divided into groups of 3-4 people and a topic is assigned to each group. The students then learn to research literature using search engines which would be useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles, such us Google Scholar, Scirus or Polibuscador (a specific search platform of the UPV). This part of the activity is carried out in a computer room at the University with the teacher providing some key words to the students.

After the research, the students must select a scientific article related to their topic and extract the relevant information from it, which is finally translated into a poster. As supporting material, students are provided with some instructions, "a rubric for posters production”, which includes information about the different parts of a poster with illustrative examples. The teacher coordinates the preparation of the poster in tutorial sessions.

Finally, the posters are shown in the classroom and students analyze and evaluate all of them. In order to make the evaluation process easier students have another rubric at their disposal, which specifies the relevant aspects that must be taken into account when evaluating the posters.

During the 2009/10 academic year 7 posters were produced with very good final marks. In addition, students have shown their interest throughout the process and have appreciated it, because they noticed that this can be very useful for them in the near future. To sum up, the development of the poster has been revealed as a good tool for students, who are able to work as a team, find scientific information and show that information in a concise and attractive way. Therefore the initial goals have been achieved.