PROJECT-BASED LEARNING AS A METHODOLOGY TO BOOST CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

In today’s increasingly competitive environments it is essential that Higher Education institutions focus on society and improve their capacity to address social needs, adapting their programmes to these changing demands.

The creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has brought a paradigm shift in Education, now placing the focus on students' autonomous learning. Today's curricula define learning objectives in terms of the competences acquired and include methodology changes in the teaching-learning process.

This study aims to assess the usefulness of Project-Based Learning (PBL) to boost the cross-cutting competence, Ability to develop Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (ACIE). This work intends to measure how this active methodology contributes to attaining one of the key competences in Bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Business and ultimately improves teaching-learning processes and student achievement.

Active methodologies generally see learning as a constructive rather than receptive process in which students do work in teams, continuously assessing what they learn. Of these methodologies, PBL offers numerous benefits such as higher student motivation, better career skills and competences development or a closer connection between theory and practice and knowledge from different disciplines. A comparative analysis between groups of students who have learned with PBL and others who have studied with traditional methodologies has been conducted to test its usefulness in the development of the cross-cutting competence, ACIE.