Academic success, Student’s profile and Bologna’s process:

Abstract

The Spanish university is in the process of implementation of the European University Education Area (EUEA) that will change the teaching methodologies that have been used routinely. The main objective od this paper is to examine to what extent the new teaching methodologies may affect the qualifications obtained by students. In order to deal with this objective, we construct a survey among students in the course Economic Policy I of the University of Barcelona, where we can distinguish two groups of students: those who have followed the teaching methodology of EUEA, and those who have kept the traditional methodology of evaluation. This structure of data forms a natural experiment, in which there is a group affected by the change in teaching methodology, and a control group not affected by the change. The estimated ordered logit model allows us to show that the new teaching methodologies based on the implementation of the EUEA help improving substantially the scores of students. Other factors that are useful to achieve better scores are the hours of study, attendance and background knowledge of students. In this regard, a successful implementation of the EUEA requires developing the suitable motivation strategies to increase the number of hours that students devote to the teaching courses, increase the percentage of attendance at lessons and guarantee the coordination of the different programs of the teaching courses. To sum up, the implementation of the EUEA can be an effective instrument for improving the academic performance of Spanish university students if the reform considers all those aspects influencing such performance. This must be taken into account in the assessment of a demanding reform both for students and professors