Joaquín Gairín and Patricia Olmos have coordinated the “Evaluation of EduCaixa educational programs” program. This publication summarizes the set of actions carried out by the evaluation team and their most significant contributions, trying to give an overview of everything that has been done and achieved, while reporting on the mechanisms that allow access to accumulated knowledge. It is not only about disseminating the Project and its products, but also about encouraging and providing tools to educational centers and their teachers to improve their intervention processes on the issue addressed.
The current educational panorama is generating reflections in relation to decision-making in the pedagogical field and educators need to have precise information that allows them to make informed decisions. In order to face the pedagogical challenges of the current educational context, and contribute to the improvement and transformation of education, the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation (FBLC), through EduCaixa, has put its interest in promoting a culture of innovation practices based on generating evidence and transferring the results to the educational community of the territory. This is how the “Evaluation of EduCaixa educational programs” program begins, the main objective of which is to evaluate the impact of educational programs based on the competence development of students.
Within the framework of this Program, the EDO research group, together with the Virolai School, has carried out the evaluation of the Aprender a Aprender Project, an interdisciplinary globalized work experience that seeks to stimulate the competence of learning to learn, through the implementation of meaningful and cooperative learning projects, with specific objectives that can be summarized as:
- Determine the progress of the learning to learn competence and of other competencies involved in each interdisciplinary proposal.
- Evaluate the transfer by students of learning related to the main competence in other contexts.
- Evaluate the impact of the interdisciplinary proposals linked to the project in the development of the learning to learn competence.
The learning to learn competence is one of the eight key competences for lifelong learning defined by the EU (Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of December 18, 2006) that requires, on the part of students, the ability to organize and plan the own learning autonomously. It is the ability to manage time and information effectively individually or in a group.
Developing this competence requires significant learning processes, as well as the work of other complementary key competences. Motivation and confidence are crucial. Working on all these aspects is the objective of this project, as well as the evaluation of its impact.
In this sense, within the framework of the Learn to Learn project, and serving its objectives, a group of educational centers in Catalonia have carried out, during the 2019/2020 academic year, a work proposal for projects based on cooperative learning (with a PBL methodology) and characterized by being globalized, transversal and / or interdisciplinary, as well as adapted to the needs and casuistry of each of the participating institutions.
Throughout the design and implementation process, teachers and researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Lleida, with the collaboration of the educational team of the Virolai School, have collected data from the centers, with the aim of being able to determine, at the end of the experience, the impact of the proposal on the development of the learning to learn competence.