BOLOGNA VERSUS CLASSICAL TEACHING/LEARNING PARADIGMS

The implementation of the Bologna paradigm has brought to our classrooms a new kind of teaching/learning processes. At first, the paradigm seems quite right in its fundamentals but, we believe, that it really does not apply to all students. This happens because the students get to university level with very different backgrounds and that makes all the difference when submitted to different teaching/learning processes.

So, after two years working with the new methodologies proposed by the Bologna Process and of very disappoint scholar results, we started a new program for our low background profile in mathematics students. This new program mix the basic ideas from the Bologna Process, that is, putting the student in the center of the action, with some other ideas, old-fashionable ideas, from the New School, from the beginning of the XX century. Collaborative learning within a continuous evaluation context was experimented in math and statistics classes with very good results compared to traditional teaching processes. This was experimented during four semesters with low-profile background students in mathematics, so that we thought that the Bologna paradigm would not apply at all to them.

Encouraged by the results obtained, we, indeed, propose here a mixed teaching/learning model between the classical way and the Bologna way. The results obtained encourages very much the research in this field, because they show higher motivation levels and better results than those submitted to the typical receipt or even those submitted to the Bologna paradigm all alone.