ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ VALUATION RELATED TO KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER (KT) AFTER A PROJECT BASED LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Introduction:
The definition of KT relates to students' learn behaviours, skills, and knowledge learnt in one context and applied in another (Detterman, 1993). Researchers started a debate about how KT takes place. Different theories have been developed establishing that knowledge is seen as a stable and transferable commodity handed down from somebody who knows (e.g., a teacher/master) to somebody who does not know (e.g., a pupil/an apprentice) (Nielsen, 2008). Recent research, points out that in Higher Education KT continues to be disregarded and very sporadic activities following this objective are occurred (Grossman, 2014).

Objective:
This paper centers on analyzing students’ perception of how PBL promotes KT among subjects with related contain from a practical perspective. Considering this, our objectives focused on:
1. How students perceive the possibility of using the contains of the subject where the project is carried out in the context of other subjects.
2. To analyze the students’ valuation to the fact that the project let them connect knowledge and develop competences related to other subjects, helping them to the study and assimilation.
3. Students’ valuation of how working separately parts of the project in other subjects helped them to build a complete project in the context of our subjects.
4. To detect the more related subject contains of the Degree they are enrolled in to develop the project.

Methodology:
A questionnaire was administered to 464 university students from two Spanish universities (Huelva and Murcia), enrolled in a secondary course of Infant and Primary School Teacher Degrees in the Faculty of Education. The measuring tool was a questionnaire elaborated for this purpose (Cronbach Alfa= 0.932) consisting of total of 53 items divided into: Students identification variables (items 1-9) and a measure of the Degree Competences using a Likert Scale (1: Totally disagree to 5: Totally agree): Generic Competences (items 10-27), Specific Competences (items 28-35) and Transversal Competences (items 36-40). Further, the questionnaire measures student’s valuation of the project and perception of KT possibilities (items 41-53). Additionally, the questionnaire has an open part where students can express what they value most or missed about learning through PBL. For this paper we focused on items related to perception of transfer knowledge possibilities (items 41 – 53).

Results and Conclusions:
Students highlighted the PBL possibilities for promoting KT. According to objective 1, most students indicated that the knowledge from PBL may be transferred and applied to other subjects in the degree (82.1%) and to daily life (59.7%). In relation to objectives 2 and 3, students agreed that learning related competences among subjects helped them to transfer knowledge and achieve specific subjects’ objectives (75%). Results for objective 4 showed that student’s perceived that the project were highly related to other subject of the Degree they were enrolled in (85%) being the most mentioned “Attention to Diversity” and “Developmental Psychology”. However, a total of 28 subjects were pointed out as related and useful for the knowledge transfer and so that for helping them with the assimilation of the theoretical and practical content. Consequently, the conclusions of this empirical study suggest that PBL could be an innovative and a potential powerful methodology to improve learning in Higher Education.