Spanish Higher Education Research Articles

The ups and downs of managing study abroad: Insights from Spanish higher education

This study delves into the experiences with managing study abroad reported by two mobility programs stakeholders: the vice-dean of International Relations and an Erasmus coordinator at a Faculty of a Spanish University. By means of content analysis of semi-structured interviews, this article aims to shed light on the intricacies of study abroad management in Spain, focusing on: 1) the types of study abroad programs that they are in charge of and their peculiarities, 2) the evolution of study abroad management in their institution, taking into account the pre- and post-pandemic period, and 3) the constraints and improvements to study abroad programs management that they are cognizant of. By approaching two types of stakeholders, considered to represent top-down and bottom-up study abroad management, the present study aims to triangulate perceptions from different actors that participate in the governance and guidance of study abroad in Spanish higher education.

Identifying the Determinants of Academic Success: A Machine Learning Approach in Spanish Higher Education

Academic performance plays a key role in assessing the quality and equity of a country’s educational system. Studying the aspects or factors that influence university academic performance is an important research opportunity. This article synthesizes research that employs machine learning techniques to identify the determinants of academic performance in first-year university students. A total of 8700 records from the Complutense University of Madrid corresponding to all incoming students in the academic year 2022–2023 have been analyzed, for which information was available on 28 variables related to university access, academic performance corresponding to the first year, and socioeconomic characteristics. The methodology included feature selection using Random Forest and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) to identify the main predictors of academic performance and avoid overfitting in the models, followed by analysis with four different machine learning techniques: Linear Regression, Support Vector Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost. The models showed similar predictive performance, also highlighting the coincidence in the predictors of academic performance both at the end of the first semester and at the end of the first academic year. Our analysis detects the influence of variables that had not appeared in the literature before, the admission option and the number of enrolled credits. This study contributes to understanding the factors that impact academic performance, providing key information for implementing educational policies aimed at achieving excellence in university education. This includes, for example, peer tutoring and mentoring where high- and low-performing students could participate.

Becoming an academic in Spanish higher education: an in-depth narrative study

PurposeThis article focuses on understanding the evolution of the academic identity of a university academic within the contemporary university context, highlighting the significant influence of professional performance evaluations.Design/methodology/approachIn order to achieve the objectives, a narrative-biographical approach was used, through an in-depth analysis of the life and professional career of a Spanish academic.FindingsThe results reveal a progression in identity from a state of naivety to that of a survivor, characterized by a strong adherence to the demands of scientific production, with research assuming a central role. This shift is motivated by an enduring pursuit of stable employment conducive to full professional and personal development. Several factors influence this change, including the context of evaluation, lack of funding, relationship with the thesis supervisor, and job instability, among others. The article concludes by outlining policy implications aimed at enhancing the work and professional standards of university faculty. These recommendations include awareness-raising initiatives, re-evaluating existing evaluation systems, and promoting institutional support, among other measures. Implementing these strategies is expected to optimize the professional growth of academics and, therefore, enhance the quality of services provided by universities.Originality/valueAlthough previous research has acknowledged the impact of these evaluations, this study stands out by exploring how academic identity is shaped and reconfigured over the course of a career.

Evaluating the design of digital tools for the transition to an e-continuous assessment in higher education

Evaluation is a crucial part of the teaching and learning process in any higher education institution and one that has gone through a deep change. This has been particularly true since the Bologna Declaration (http://www.ehea.info/page-ministerial-conference-bologna-1999, 1999) ushered in the European higher education area, with the subsequent major rise in the employment of continuous assessment methods focused on student participation. This article analyses the impact on academic performance of e-continuous assessment based on e-tests on a virtual platform as a previous step towards the substitution of the traditional evaluation system, based on a final exam, with a continuous evaluation system, prescribed as an alternative preferred by the regulations of multiple Spanish universities. Microeconometric models have been applied to a database of 250 first-year students on the Business Administration and Management course at the University of Seville (Spain). Our findings show that e-tests could prevent the risk of students dropping out and could also provide a credible predictor of students’ academic marks in the theoretical contents of the subject, but not in those of a practical or applied nature. Based on the results of this evaluation, an e-continuous assessment has been developed in the subject, which has become the majority option for students, with 90% participation, while also increasing pass rates. Moreover, the positive effect of a computing environment does not appear to be limited to the classroom, but also extends to students’ home environments. This teaching experience shows that the swift feedback that e-tools provides, especially in especially in environments of large class size such as in the class evaluated, could support instructors’ personal tutoring of students’ progress and promote a greater implementation of e-continuous assessment in Spanish higher education.

Inclusive Active Methodologies in Spanish Higher Education during the Pandemic

The period of pandemic caused by the arrival of COVID-19 had a series of repercussions at the personal, social, cultural and educational levels. The confinement declared by government agencies caused a shift from face-to-face to virtual learning, which led to certain adaptations and the use of digital tools in order to carry out the teaching-learning process. This technological proliferation became a challenge for the educational community and for the development of pedagogical and inclusive models that could ensure pedagogical continuity. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to analyse the scientific production on active and innovative methodologies that were used during the COVID-19 pandemic period and their effect on the personal, academic and social performance of Higher Education students in the Spanish context. A systematic review of the scientific literature was carried out in accordance with the criteria established in the PRISMA declaration. Among the results obtained, flipped learning stands out as the most used methodology, which increases motivation among other aspects. In terms of knowledge areas, Social Sciences prevails. Finally, it should be noted that the use of active and innovative methodologies improves performance at academic, personal and social levels.

Assessment of Actual Workload and Student Performance in the Agricultural Engineering Final Degree Project in a Spanish Higher Education Context

Twenty years after the Bologna Declaration and a decade after Spanish university engineering degrees were updated to comply with the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), there is still uncertainty on the degree of adaptation to the ECTS system of the final degree project (FDP) course in engineering programs, especially in terms of the workloads allocated to students. The inherent characteristics of the FDP course, with all the learning activities of an unstructured nature, make the real student workload as well as that of the FDP teachers very uncertain. This study addresses this issue by (1) identifying the nature of the unstructured student learning activities related to the FDP course, (2) measuring the time spent by students in the different FDP learning activities throughout the course, and (3) measuring the workload of FDP teachers. A user-friendly smartphone application was configured so that students and teachers in the agricultural engineering degree program at the University of Seville registered the time spent daily on each of the identified FDP learning (students) and supervising (instructors) activities. The results showed that the reported FDP workloads by students who passed the FDP course in either of the two exam periods of the academic year were not significantly higher than the nominal ECTS credit hours stipulated for the FDP course. The FDP teachers reported notably higher workloads than those stipulated by the university regulations. No significant correlation was found between student workload and FDP scores.

Factors related to teaching quality: a validated questionnaire to assess teaching in Spanish higher education

Quality in higher education requires the evaluation of the teaching-learning and assessment methodologies used by the teachers, the adaptation of the students, as well as the resources used. To respond to this need, this study aims to analyze the validity and reliability of the Factors Related to Teaching Quality (FRTQ) questionnaire, developed for this research. The sample was obtained among Spanish undergraduate students (n = 291). Validation was performed by a content and construct analysis through a review of the literature on the dimensions of teaching, learning and assessment, in addition to obtaining the measure of sampling adequacy and a factor extraction. Reliability was determined by Cronbach’s alpha. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed, and the factor analysis showed a six-factor structured model: Functions of the assessment; Attention to diversity, Clarity and control of the educational process; Learning resources; Teaching resources; Assessment resources. The conclusions indicate the importance of approaching some aspects of the educational process from the dimensions of teaching and learning at the same time due to their transversal nature, as well as the relevance of having a useful instrument to evaluate the processes of change and improvement of teaching in Spanish higher education.

A systematic analysis of learning analytics using multi-source data in the context of Spain

ABSTRACT Learning analytics (LA) employs educational data to improve the timeliness of support for learners. Apart from technical aspects, there is a need to understand social complexities brought about by different stakeholders, so as to systematise the adoption of LA in Higher Education (HE). We present an analysis of the situation, needs and challenges of LA in the context of Spanish HE, considering managers’, teachers’ and students’ perspectives. Qualitative research is employed using recursive abstraction. Results reveal that the level of institutional adoption is low and none of the analysed institutions had an LA policy. Furthermore, only two of these institutions had an initial LA strategy. While the institutions shared some commonalities in their objectives for LA, chosen tools and adoption challenges, the distinct differences in the political contexts and institutional practices among the institutions reaffirmed that LA solutions and services cannot be implemented in the same manner. Moreover, different needs for LA and concerns are identified about its adoption among managers, students and teachers. These observations lead to our conclusion that the main challenges to implement LA in Spain are not related to technological issues but to the social and cultural issues rooted in institutions and those associated with different stakeholders.

Towards Inclusion in Spanish Higher Education: Understanding the Relationship between Identification and Discrimination

It is more and more evident that there is diversity among university students, but this diversity encompasses a wide variety of personal characteristics that, on occasion, may be subject to rejection or discrimination. The feeling of inequality is the result of one stand‐alone characteristic or an intersection of many. To widen our knowledge of this diversity and to be able to design actions with an inclusive approach, we have set out to explore the relationship between students’ feelings of discrimination, their group identification and their intersections. Participants for the study are selected from protected groups which fall into the following criteria: ethnic minority, illness, migrant minority, disability, linguistic minority, sexual orientation, income, political ideology, gender, age and religion. We will refer to this relationship as the ‘discrimination rate.’ To fulfil our objective, we have given a questionnaire to a sample of 2,553 students from eight Spanish universities. The results indicate that the characteristics with which they most identify are religion, age, sex and political ideology. However, the highest rate of discrimination is linked to linguistic minority, ideology and migration. Regarding intersectionality, it is worth noting that 16.6% of students feel discriminated against for more than one characteristic, with the most frequent relationships being the following: (1) ethnic or migrant minorities (2) sexual orientation, sex, being under 30, leftist ideology, low income, linguistic minority and (3) Christian Catholic, right‐wing and upper‐class ideology.

University gardens for sustainable citizenship: assessing the impacts of garden-based learning on environmental and food education at Spanish higher education

Purpose Gardens are being used at all educational stages, because they provide with a real-world context for active and experiential learning. In Spain, there exists a movement in favor of their incorporation to higher education for a variety of purposes but prevalently as an innovative resource to teach sciences to pre-service teachers. The purpose of this study is assessing the impacts of such pedagogical practice on university students’ learning and behavioral changes in the areas of environmental and food citizenship, two key dimensions of contemporary citizenship that are essential to achieve sustainable societies. Design/methodology/approach Data was collected by means of an electronic, open-ended question survey completed by 170 students from 6 different universities where gardens are used. Answers were qualitatively analyzed using MAXQDA software to develop a system of content categories and subcategories in relation to reported learning and behavioral changes. Findings Widespread among universities was learning on organic agriculture practices, greater appreciation of agricultural labor, greater willingness to cultivate, higher awareness of environmental impacts of agriculture, improved behaviors regarding waste separation and enhanced fruit and vegetable consumption. Originality/value This work delves into how university gardens act as a vehicle through which students integrate knowledge and reflect on their environmental, food and consumption behaviors. Thus, it supports on evidences, the use of gardens at higher education to nurture two dimensions of contemporary citizenship essential to achieve sustainability.

Analysis of Subject-Verb Agreement Errors in Third Person Singular Verb Forms by Spanish University Students: A Corpus-Based Study

This study is aimed at analyzing subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors with third person singular lexical verbs in the Present Simple by Spanish higher-education students in a computerized learner corpus from Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR). The corpus is composed of 155 participants and 246 writing samples and it consists of the students’ spontaneous writings in response to a compulsory online forum from the nonlinguistic subject, ICT Tools Applied to the Learning of English, which is included in the curriculum of the Degree in Early Years Education. The SVA errors found in the corpus were classified according to Dulay, Burt and Krashen’s (1982) Surface Strategy Taxonomy, which groups language errors into four different types: omission, addition, misformation and misordering. The results show that the most frequent type of error made by the students is misformation, followed by misordering and by addition, which account for almost 95% of the total number of errors, whereas omission is the least frequent type of error, accounting for only 5% of all the errors. At the same time, the analysis indicates that the errors produced by the students are mainly intralingual, reflecting an inadequate or incomplete learning of the target language, and also interlingual since some errors committed by the learners are related to native language (NL) transfer. These results suggest some pedagogical implications for the teaching and learning of SVA rules which are also included in the paper.

Digital Competence in Spanish University Education and Its Use by Students

Technologies have massively burst into all fields, including Higher Education. The current students have grown up surrounded by technologies, which is reflected in their behavior. For this reason, universities have adapted by integrating digital competence into their training offer, improving learning processes and adjusting to the university profile. The objective of this work is to ascertain how digital skills are used by Spanish higher education (bachelor’s and master’s degree) students, thus verifying whether so-called digital competence is being actively used in higher education. A survey was applied to 324 individuals, highlighting among its results that the university panorama is in a situation where digital tools are very useful for its improvement. These data were collected before the global pandemic, after which the use of online tools intensified. However, the students are still not aware of all of them, or they do not use them.

Virtu@l-ApS: Technological Support for Virtual Service-Learning

El Aprendizaje-Servicio Virtual (ApSV) es el Aprendizaje-Servicio (ApS) mediado por las TIC (Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación) –tanto para la prestación del servicio como para el apoyo, monitorización y evaluación del aprendizaje por parte de los docentes− y concebido para situaciones en que la comunicación cara a cara entre estudiantes, profesores y beneficiarios del servicio no es posible. La experiencia ha demostrado que sería de gran interés disponer de una aplicación web para el soporte del ApSV (y, en general, de ApS). Presentamos aquí el desarrollo de dicha aplicación web: Virtu@l-ApS. Hasta la fecha, este proyecto de desarrollo de software se ha llevado a cabo en el marco de dos Proyectos de Fin de Grado colaborativos e interdisciplinares de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), de los grados en Educación Social e Ingeniería Informática, respectivamente. Aunque la versión de la aplicación web actualmente disponible carece de importantes funcionalidades, la experiencia de su desarrollo ha sido extremadamente útil, en particular, para la clarificación de los requisitos de una aplicación real, completamente operativa, que esperamos contribuya al soporte y la expansión del ApS en la Enseñanza Superior en España.

Systematic Review of Good Teaching Practices with ICT in Spanish Higher Education. Trends and Challenges for Sustainability

Good teaching practices are developed in order to improve student learning. With technological and social development, educational practices increasingly demand the use of technology, so having good teaching practices with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is essential. At the same time, the Sustainable Development Agenda of the United Nations for the year 2030 is setting the principles of sustainable action for today’s society. In this context, the following objectives were proposed: to identify the good teaching practices with ICT that are being developed in Spanish higher education and to establish the relationship between good teaching practices with ICT and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). For this purpose, the method of systematic review of the literature based on the PRISMA protocol was used. A total of 27 documents published in the period 2008–2019 on good teaching practices with ICT in Spanish higher education were analyzed. Among the results, the emerging trend of good practices with ICT, the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) as the main technology in good practices, and the majority of good practices in the development of SDG #4 (Quality Education) are highlighted. Finally, it is a challenge for teachers to include all these aspects in their classroom teaching.

Design in Spanish Higher Education: Competences and New Technologies

In Spain, education in the field of design is not clearly structured and fails to dovetail with current legal and professional reality in terms of the profiles and competences that are offered. This article presents a structured set of competences aimed at undergraduate, university-level, programs that is well-adjusted to the professional accreditation system and establishes a structure and classification that is specific and relevant to this field. This will serve as a starting point for the analysis of the unique characteristics of higher education design programs in the setting of the new paradigm brought about by technological change, considering what new information and communication technologies bring to the process, particularly in online education platforms.

Development and validation of servant leadership scale in Spanish higher education

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is twofold. First is the validation of a scale to measure the servant leadership of the university leaders. Second is to analyze how servant leadership affects the career satisfaction and life satisfaction of the academics.Design/methodology/approachUsing a survey of 148 academics at universities located in Spain collected in May 2018, a couple of models were conducted using structural equation model techniques: a confirmatory factor analysis of second order in order to assess the leadership scale and a mediation model to assess how servant leadership impacts on the life satisfaction through career satisfaction.FindingsResults reveal that leadership is a multi-dimensional construct having dimensions namely: behaving ethically, development, emotional healing, empowerment, pioneering, relationship building and wisdom. The total effect of servant leadership on life satisfaction is null due to a competitive mediation of career satisfaction.Originality/valueResearch on servant leadership has primarily focused on business organizations through extensive search in peer-reviewed databases the authors could not find a scale to measure servant leadership behavior in higher education. Additionally, the study assesses the role of career satisfaction as mediator between servant leadership and life satisfaction. Existing research has called for further research into both career and life satisfaction. Life satisfaction research has been criticized on the grounds that it has mainly overlooked the work/organizational settings. Moreover, the authors could only find little research into life satisfaction in higher education, that too in context of students.

Aceptación del Modelo Tecnológico en la enseñanza superior

En las últimas décadas la incorporación de las plataformas de teleformación a la educación superior ha supuesto que los alumnos convivan con un elemento ajeno a su vida social, por lo que su implicación con ella depende de un gran número de factores. A través del Modelo de Aceptación Tecnológica (TAM) de Arteaga y Duarte (2010), ideado originalmente por Davis en 1989, el cual se basa en la teoría psicológica de Azjen y Fishbein (1980), se ha procedido a recabar las opiniones que los estudiantes de Grado de Educación Primaria de la Universidad de Córdoba (N=546) tienen sobre Moodle, -plataforma para desarrollar la formación online en dicha universidad-, por medio del establecimiento de 23 hipótesis. El principal resultado ha sido constatar, que el modelo anglosajón puede ser aplicado en el contexto español sin riesgo de pérdida o sesgo de información. Por otra parte, se ha encontrado que el sexo no es una variable predictora del éxito/fracaso en la aceptación de esta tecnología, al igual que sucede con la formación previa que tengan los estudiantes. El empleo del modelo TAM a la educación superior española revertirá en el uso de una forma más eficaz de las tecnologías emergentes que día a día se van incorporando a la docencia universitaria.

Conocimiento y Educación Superior desde la perspectiva de género: sociología, políticas públicas y epistemología.

In the last thirty years there have been major changes in Spanish higher education and research. It has been due to various causes, but mainly due to the increase of public and private universities and new public policies that stimulate research and equality, all promoted by gender studies and feminist organizations.In this paper we briefly review these issues, examining how the situation of women in the Higher Education system and in Public Research Organizations has changed. It also examines public policies that seek to enhance equality between women and men through certain laws. And it concludes with a reflection on the changes that all this has brought about in the contents of knowledge and in the very notion of science itself.

Three paradoxes in the approach to educational technology in the education studies of the Spanish universities

The education studies of the Spanish universities are not alien to technological innovations, but their approach to them tends to be basically instrumental. Neuroscience’s contributions about the functioning of the minds that interact with these technologies give new perspectives to the academic world; perspectives that are necessary for optimizing teaching-learning processes. This article analyses the recent scientific production on ICT and innovation in Spanish higher education, as well as the Spanish university teaching guides of education degree subjects about technologies. This critical analysis is organized around three paradoxes related to information, rationality and critical sense. Comparing the analysis results with the discoveries of neuroscience during the last decades reveals limits and contradictions in those areas that tend to be considered strongest in the technology-education relationship. We draw conclusions for revising the parameters for the approach to ICT in university education.

¿Es interactiva la enseñanza en la Educación Superior? La perspectiva del alumnado

<p>La investigación ha puesto de manifiesto las ventajas que tiene la docencia basada en la interacción y el diálogo entre el alumnado y entre este y el profesorado en las aulas. Sin embargo, en España, la interacción como método de enseñanza-aprendizaje es aún empleada minoritariamente. En este artículo nos preguntamos por el estado de esta cuestión en el ámbito de la Educación Superior. Para dar respuesta a este interrogante se recoge una investigación exploratoria basada en la realización de cincuenta entrevistas en profundidad con estudiantes de todos los campos de conocimiento en dos universidades españolas. Los resultados muestran que los métodos didácticos de docencia universitaria habituales en la universidad española responden a un paradigma educativo de corte expositivo en el que los casos de enseñanza-aprendizaje por interacción constituyen episodios aislados. Asimismo, fuera del marco espacio-temporal de las aulas tampoco se producen numerosos encuentros interactivos para la enseñanza-aprendizaje entre el alumnado y entre el alumnado y el profesorado. Los resultados también muestran qué aspectos facilitan la interacción y qué aspectos la entorpecen. Es posible concluir la necesidad y urgencia de introducir prácticas de enseñanza-aprendizaje por interacción en la universidad española: el alumnado demanda un cambio metodológico y quienes han tenido algunas experiencias interactivas aseguran haberse implicado más en el estudio, haber profundizado más en el contenido, haber disfrutado con la materia y haber obtenido mejores resultados académicos. Las prácticas de enseñanza-aprendizaje por interacción son imprescindibles en la mejora de la calidad docente en el ámbito de la educación superior.</p>