Developing competences in Higher Education through innovation in the teaching methodology

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the promotion of an education leading to the development of competences (European Commission, 2007; Perrenoud, 1999) has been a main concern of Portuguese education policies (Ministério da Educação, 2001), in spite of some recent changes (Ministério da Educação, 2012, 2014). Portugal has also embraced this concern through the implementation of the Bologna propositions (Bologna Declaration, 1999), which transformed Higher Education. The Department of Education of the University of Aveiro (Portugal) has been working along these lines since 2007. This paper describes a study conducted in a first and a second cycle degrees in courses on teaching the mother tongue. Three research questions were defined: i) Is it possible to design teaching strategies leading to the development of competences that allow students to adapt to a variety of educational contexts? ii) Can these strategies promote an awareness of the need to approach education in the mother tongue in a transversal way? iii) Which role can feedback assessment play in this process? This paper deals with the first question and a course within a second cycle degree attended by future early childhood educators and schoolteachers. We analyzed data concerning i) the performance of the students and ii) their conceptions. The results of this analysis (mixing statistics and content analysis) revealed that the use of a methodology that made the student the center of the teaching/learning process could lead to the development of competences, especially if the students were aware of that effort.