Abstract:

Introduction: The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) involves a new conception of the university teaching culture. This new situation implies that a health professional should acquire competencies such as the ability to research and to develop critical thinking.
Aim: To examine the workload and satisfaction of the students in the development and evaluation of a mini-research project.
Methods: This experience was performed in the 2010/2011 academic year with a group of 8 students who completed the optional subject of computer applications in medical practice for the Bachelor of Medicine at the Miguel Hernández University. The workshop "Financiamos tu idea” consisted in developing a free topic research project in groups of 2 people or individually. The final project was evaluated anonymously way by two random students using a rubric. Before this workshop, the teacher explained the guidelines for developing a research project through a lecture, a sample video and a previous workshop about review research projects. A review project guide developed by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, questionnaire to evaluate the project, notes and references were provided as support material for this workshop. To assess the workload and satisfaction a questionnaire with open and closed questions was used. Finally, the participants wrote a critical composition about their learning-teaching process.
Results: 75% of the students worked individually in the workshop. 87.5% responded that the workload was high (62.5%) or medium-high (25.0%). The estimated average time of the project was 3 hours. A questionnaire to evaluate and lectures were considered to be the most useful support materials, with an average score of 8.5 out of 10. 87.5% of the students were satisfied and 12.5% were not satisfied with the workshop. The main reason for dissatisfaction was the stress generated by workshop the activities. Meanwhile the reasons for satisfaction were: "When I finished writing my project I looked forward to carrying it out ", "I think that we wrote an interesting project and we may develop it in the near future" "The workshop was very complete the sense that we can show what you have learned". The main disadvantages of the evaluation process were: the difficulty in development critical thinking, the difficulty assessing the creativity and the originality of their project and identifying a good hypothesis. However, despite the difficulty of the evaluation process the majority of students showed the evaluation as a very productive experience for learning.
Conclusions: The workload has a negative influence on the satisfaction of the students whereas the workshop is a great motivation for the students and their teaching-learning process. The students perceived that the development of critical thinking is a difficult competence to acquire. Therefore, this constitutes is an important research program in the development the activities about this competence.

Keywords:

Workshop, teaching experience, workload and satisfaction.