Active Learning and Generic Competences in an Operating Systems Course

The Bologna Declaration and the implementation of the European Higher Education Area arepromoting the use of active learning methodologies. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectsobtainedafter applyingactive learning methodologies to the achievement of generic competencesaswellas tothe academicperformance. This studyhasbeencarriedoutat theUniversidadPolite´cnicade Madrid, where these methodologies have been applied to the Operating Systems I subject of thedegree in Technical Engineering in Computer Systems. The fundamental hypothesis tested waswhether the implementation of active learning methodologies (cooperative learning and problembased learning) favours the achievement of certain generic competences (‘teamwork’ and ‘planningand time management’) and also whether this fact improved the academic performance of ourstudents. The original approach of this work consists in using psychometric tests to measure thedegree of acquired student’s generic competences instead of using opinion surveys, as usual. Resultsindicated that active learning methodologies improve the academic performance when compared tothe traditional lecture/discussion method, according to the success rate obtained. These methodsseem to have as well an effect on the teamwork competence (the perception of the behaviour of theother members in the group) but not on the perception of each students’ behaviour. Active learningdoes not produce any significant change in the generic competence ‘planning and time manage-ment’.