The distance between teachers’ and students’ work in EHEA: ¿a dangerous gap?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyzing the relationships between teachers’ and students’ teaching and learning activities. Data were drawn from the evaluation of an ECTS Experimental Project in the degree of Education (year three) in the Faculty of Education of La Laguna University. We begin presenting the frequencies of teachers’ and students’ teaching and learning activities; but the central focus is the analysis; by means of correlations; of the relationships between them. The results shows inconsistencies between the educational practice analyzed and the EHEA pedagogical proposals: the activity more frequently employed by lecturers was oral exposition; moreover; the evaluation procedures more used seems not to promote student autonomous learning; and students tend to use teacher offered learning materials more than autonomously searched ones. It seems to be a close relationship between the following activities: teaching activities and evaluation procedures according to its individual or group nature (individual activities are related to individual evaluation procedures and group activities to group evaluation procedures); more open ended teaching and learning activities and leaning materials offered by the teacher; and  individual evaluation procedures and individual student activities and learning materials. The pedagogical proposals of the EHEA emphasize the relevance of group work as a teaching and learning strategy; as well as an important evaluation procedure. Our results point to the need to go more deeply into this issue.