Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area conception, at once with the ideals of Bologna Declaration, highlight the critical importance of evaluating the quality of scientific programmes to guarantee the quality of teaching and learning through the implementation of a comprehensive qualifications’ framework. In this process, learning outcomes are acknowledged as a crucial tool to describe and define, not only the learning outputs, but also the methodology adopted to teach and to assess them.

The present paper aims to contribute to the evaluation and reflection on learning outcomes implementation by the Portuguese Higher Education Institutions. To do so, learning outcomes of higher education programmes in business sciences area were analyzed through content analysis. To measure the gap between desirable and real learning outcomes it is adopted as analytical references political and conceptual frameworks. In fact, one of the most influential concepts of the 1996 Delors Report was precisely the four pillars of learning, namely:
(i) Learning to know – a broad general knowledge with the opportunity to work in depth on a small number of subjects;
(ii) Learning to do – to acquire not only occupational skills but also the competence to deal with situations and to work in teams;
(iii) Learning to be – to develop one’s personality and to be able to act with growing autonomy, judgment and personal responsibility and
(iv) Learning to live together – by developing an understanding of other people and an appreciation of interdependence.

The analysis of 421 cycles was supported by a competences matrix (Diana & Soares, 2017), and data was correlated according to four independent variables: program degree (BA, MSc or PhD), subsystem (university or polytechnic), sector (public or private), and type of accreditation (current study cycles or new cycles).

The results show that there are several differences between learning outcome in business sciences area when the private and public sectors are compared. While learning outcome in business sciences area from the public sector empathizes “problem-solving” skills, programmes from the private sector mention learning outcomes which privileged “leadership” as a critical skill to students develop. When the content analysis focuses the university and polytechnic axis, no relevant variances was found.

Regarding the skills of the 21st century proposed by Delors, comparative results confirmed the domain of learning to live together seems poorly developed. The highest frequency found was teamwork: 48% of learning outcome of study programmes in business sciences area mention teamwork as a skill to be developed for their students as results of their learning. However, only 5% of the learning outcome of study programmes in business sciences area refers the respect for diversity as an important skill to be taught and learned. Still, "learn to live" pillar seems to be highly undervalued in the study programmes under analysis. In fact, only teamwork is valued in 48% of the study programmes. The remaining pillars, although with some skills with low occurrences, have a much higher weight, with some rates up of the 70%. It is therefore suitable to state that higher education are empowering their students to meet the demands of the XXI in terms of competences to be acquired, but only in the pillar "to learn to live" which assumes a transversal importance for all study programmes explored, regardless subsystem, sector or degree.

Keywords:

Learning outcomes, higher education, business sciences, Delors pillars.