Students in mobility programs in a Portuguese university: a study in a first cycle of Bologna

Abstract

Since the 90s, it is common to have foreign students in Higher Education classrooms in Portugal. Nowadays given the pressure to internationalize the Portuguese Higher Education and all the measures taken in order to achieve this goal, everyone – including not only the teachers and the institutions, but also the students themselves – needs to reflect upon the importance of these issues.

The study presented in this text was designed to identify and describe the conceptions of foreign students in mobility programs regarding the student exchange they had lived while attending one of the courses we teach. It is related with another study focused on the conceptions of the Portuguese students attending the same course and another one (also centered on the teaching of the mother tongue), which allows us to reflect upon teaching methodologies and assessment systems we have been using and their effects on the acquisition of knowledge and the development of competencies by the students, essential to work with 3 to 10 year-old children.

This exploratory study follows a qualitative methodology and concerns the group of foreign students enrolled in mobility programs we had in our classes between 2009/10 and 2015/16. We obtained data from individual written essays produced by these students at the end of the semester, included in their portfolio for assessment. Data analysis procedures included content analysis of quantitative data and descriptive statistics (absolute and relative frequencies).

Taking into account what we have written on the implementation of the Bologna Process in the University of Aveiro (UA), we compared the conceptions of the foreign students to those of their Portuguese counterparts and found some similarities, but also differences, mainly concerning the Spanish students.