Mejoras a la Comprensión de Conceptos Usando Pruebas Cualitativas

During the three-year period from January, 1 st 1995 to December 31 st , 1997, a quality development project entitled "Improving Student Understanding" was carried out at The Technical University of Denmark. The project was focussed on quality development, with the specific scope of improving students’ understanding of concepts, the aims being both to investigate students’ learning processes and identifying the main types of problems in obtaining conceptual understanding and to develop means and ways of improving students understanding, including models of quality development with the participation of teachers. This paper describes the method, models and evaluation instruments for the quality of the teaching-learning process, based on the students’ understanding of the crucial, central topics within the contents of each course. The relevance of previous knowledge, understanding of calculations, value of examinations vs. tests of understanding , difficulties experienced by the students, required changes and how to achieve the changes needed to accomplish quality are analysed.