Developing new “Professionals”: Service learning in marketing as an opportunity to innovate in higher education

Abstract

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) promotes the use of student-centered participatory methodologies and the design of curricula focused on the acquisition of competences. The objective of this paper is to identify the categories of competence that contribute the most to achieving learning outcomes through the practice of Service Learning (SL) in the teaching of marketing. Using the categories described in the Tuning model, we design a model to analyze the relationships between perceived learning outcomes and competences. The main findings are: 1) there is no evidence of any relationship between perceived interpersonal and systemic competences and perceived learning outcomes, 2) there is a relationship between perceived instrumental competences and perceived learning outcomes and, 3) students do not perceive that achievement of learning outcomes is the cause of the grades they obtain. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications.