Abstract:

The Spanish university system is undergoing a change process aimed at the progressive implementation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This convergence process has involved, in chronological order, a new learner-centred system for credit accumulation and transfer (ECTS) based on the transparency of learning outcomes and learning processes, the redesign of university degrees to improve the response to society’s needs, a new methodological approach in which the student has an active role in the learning process, and an evaluation system that encourages the use of continuous assessment.

This new approach implies an important change in the culture that has prevailed in Spanish universities for decades, because the teacher has played the main role in the learning process and the student has adopted a rather passive role to the point that the most popular assessment system has been the final exam or test.

The aim of this study is to analyse what information students have received about the EHEA, what knowledge they have about the meaning of different concepts related to the Bologna process, and their opinions about the changes in methodology and the evaluation system that would be produced for the implementation of new curricula. To that end, a group of lecturers from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Alicante have developed a survey for different groups of students who were studying different subjects at the university to examine the students’ opinion of these topics. In order to compare the group of responses, we chose groups that were already developing a new methodology and continuous evaluation system, and others who followed a traditional methodology with a final exam.

Although we found differences between courses and degrees, in general, the results of this study are very discouraging due to: 1) that the study finds a great deal of misinformation about what the Bologna process means, and 2) that the results show that students don’t always understand the need to carry out this change and they remain committed to a large extent to the traditional methodologies and evaluation systems. If we look at rates of student satisfaction, we also appreciate that, in general, students are satisfied with both methods.

This work also allows us to draw conclusions about how the process is starting and how the implementation should be made in the coming academic years to improve the results of our teaching.

Keywords:

Student's perceptions, EHEA, evaluation systems.