Competencies Development and Active Methodologies: the Perception of Business Management Students

Abstract

The objective of the article is to examine whether and how, in the perception of undergraduate Business Administration students, the use of active methodology contributes to the development of general skills for professional training. A case study was carried out at an IES Higher Education Institution in the state of São Paulo, which adopts active teaching-learning strategies in the bachelor’s course in administration, based on the Problem-based learning (PBL) and Case-based learning (CBL) methods. The results show that it is in the practices performed in the PBL / CBL work cycle that students perceive themselves to be acquiring specific skills grouped into three competence dimensions: basic (CBs); (CSs), and problem solving (CSPs The development of skills in the educational environment requires that the learning of its components (conceptual, procedural and attitudinal) takes place through disciplinary, interdisciplinary and / or metadisciplinary procedures (sources of knowledge),
and with the support of methodologies that enable active learning , transferable, cooperative, however, autonomous for apprentices. In active methodologies, based on the problem-based model, two components of the tutorial process influence the development of competences, which are: the problem and the teacher. The problem with the quality of the structure with which it is constituted. The teacher for the various student assistance roles that he assumes in the stages of the learning cycle. The contributions of the work are methodological and empirical. Methodological insofar as the qualitative results obtained complement and distend the quantitative results already obtained in previous studies that also investigated the formation of skills in higher education in administration, under the students’ perception. Empirical because it can assist both managers in decision-making on innovative teaching-learning strategies for building skills in the school system and teachers in the (re) organization of their educational practices and in the awareness of new roles they must assume in the teaching and learning process.