The mapping of the use of active learning strategies in an engineering school

Abstract

The objective of this work is to analyse the perception of the teachers of an engineering school about the use of active strategies, which strategies they use in their classes and, in addition, the satisfaction with the use of traditional teaching strategies. The teachers' perception of new teaching strategies is important to ensure adherence to their implementation, because when acting directly in the teaching-learning process, their belief may support or hinder the implementation of new strategies. The questions are: Are teachers satisfied with the teaching strategies used? How do they perceive and eventually adhere to the active strategies in engineering teaching? The answers are important because as more teachers are aligned with his premises of new strategies, more efficient is an institutional change of strategies. In order to analyze teachers' satisfaction with teaching strategies, the option was to use the conceptual change model, which considers that if there is dissatisfaction with the strategies in use, there is an "open door" to the approach with new learning strategies. The survey data were collected by a multiple-choice questionnaire on a Likert scale, answered by 80 teachers of an engineering course, many of whom went through a training process in active learning strategies. The results indicate that, although there is a belief that active learning strategies can contribute to students' learning; teachers are satisfied with the use of traditional teaching strategies, which is a barrier to change. © 2019 University of Minho. All rights reserved.