Significant attendance in the development of the european higher education area at spanish universities

Resumen

The creation of the European Higher Education Area (Bologna, 1999) laid the foundations for a profound change in the general model of university teaching, with important consequences for what we teachers must do in our teaching role and what we make students do during learning process. To make possible the change and innovation in university education, among other measures a new European credit system focused mainly on student activity (ECTS) was implemented. In practical terms, it involves lectures reorganization and groups distribution in different learning contexts from a competency approach, to accommodate practical activities, relevant and closer to students professional life and not just expository or masterful. It is common to differentiate between Large Groups (LG) and Small Groups (SG), with, a priori, differentiated content. Usually, LG lectures are dedicated to exposition of subject key concepts and SG classes, as a practical activity within the subject framework.In face-to-face university classrooms, a paradoxical trend is being observed, according to which the small group class is considered to be compulsory attendance (in fact, attendance control seems to be an increasingly frequent habit in different subjects), while lecture attendance in large group classes is not clearly controlled. The paradoxical situation occurs when one begins to observe that, in various subjects, the number of students in a small group class significantly outnumbers the students present in the large group lecture. Thus, absenteeism in classrooms constitutes an important problem that is the object of study at our universities.Thus, along this present work we set ourselves the following objectives:(1) Identify the factors that explain, to a greater extent, university students absenteeism behaviors and attendance to face-to-face lectures from Campus Iberus and other G9 belonging universities;2) Analyze the putative relationship between the methodological and evaluation system adopted by each professor and the university students degree of attendance to face-to-face lectures;(3) To check whether there are significant differences between students according different personal-academic profiles (age, gender, grade, course, subject type) and their degree of attendance to face-to-face lectures in the investigatated university context.In order to achieve this goal, the nature of the adopted methodological approach is mixed, using both qualitative and quantitative research techniques to gather information. In accordance to all above-mentioned, this present work shows a methodological strategy designed to successfully respond to research goals on absenteeism and significant attendance of university students.