Abstract:

The National Polytechnic Institute (IPN in spanish) is a mexican public university that looks for excellence of its under and post-graduate students in areas such as Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Postgraduate department is a privileged place where innovating teaching strategies can be implemented to achieve this goal. However, at this level we still observe traditional teaching schemes which are characterized by the usage of a methodology centered on professors’ expositions and demonstrations. This teaching approach produces that the students face a lot of difficulties when they are confronted to problems in their job. These problems arise because most of the under and graduated students are unable to solve challenges by themselves.

Our study assumes that it is possible to develop a teaching scheme where the students learn to solve problems from different point of view. This may lead professors to develop new didactic strategies where teachers together with students deal with the different problems associated with the construction of the knowledge.

Some recent researches, e.g. [1, 2], show that engineering students “assume the scientific knowledge as an unchangeable collection of data, as a process of incorporation rather than a process of discovering and development. The engineering students conceive information from their previous structures, from their common sense and from intuitive concepts.” These facts demonstrate the necessity to teach the students to reason from activities that help the students discover concepts and the relations among them.

Post-graduate professors at IPN tend to motivate individual work and to neglect the team work. Moreover, they consider that the students are already prepared to work by-themselves without any help. However, in real situations this is not true. This behavior of the students comes from their undergraduate experience, where the professor gives the most important priority to notes rather than the learning process of the students. As a consequence graduated students become individualists and tend to look for solutions that are mechanical and easy to implement.

The main hypothesis of this work is to consider that a non-traditional pedagogical methodology along with activities performed in work groups create a better construction of the knowledge than a purely individual work. This methodology may allow the students to construct their own knowledge based on discussions, team analysis, and the solution of didactical exercises. The professor is another team mate that observes the cognoscitive obstacles and from this information he develops the strategies and activities that help the students to learn by themselves in a meaningful fashion.
We will describe a series of strategies applied to a group of Master in Sciences students in Telecommunications Eng. and the methodology to evaluate them.

References:
[1] Vázquez, S.M. “Rendimiento académico y patrones de aprendizaje en estudiantes de ingeniería”, Ingeniería y Universidad, vol. 13, Núm. 1, pp. 105-136, enero-junio, 2009.
[2] Mendiola, S. J.D., Herrera R. G. Cortes, S.L. González G. C., Hernández, G V y Lara G. A. “Aprendizaje basado en la unión de bloques de conocimiento (ABC)”, Ingeniería, Investigación y Tecnología, vol. XIII, Núm. 3 pp. 283-291, jul-sep., 2012.

Keywords:

Post-graduate students, teaching strategies.