The tutor's role in student learning

Higher education in Portugal, in the last forty years, has undergone profound changes with the enlargement of public higher education network, the appearance of new institutions, the quantity and the heterogeneity of students. The implementation of the Bologna Process in European community countries led to the redesign of higher education Portuguese courses as well as their corresponding curricula. In recent years, the use of Project-led education was one of the most significant changes in teaching and learning, particularly in engineering in higher education in Portugal. This teaching methodology encourages students and teachers to undertake new roles, new responsibilities and a new learning perspective. This study aims at understanding whether the role of the tutor is to be suitable to the needs and expectations of Project-led education students. These changes however are not only structural. At the University of Minho, new teaching and learning methodologies were adopted, which could guide the training of professionals on to the twenty-first century. The opportunity arising from the implementation of Project-led education in Engineering methodology was used in the University of Minho’s courses. This teaching method is intended to provide students with educational support programs that benefit the academic performance, allowing the opportunity to upgrade, train and develop the ability to study and learn more effectively. Through the Project-led education it is possible to provide students with techniques and procedures and develop the ability to communicate orally and in writing. Students and teachers have assumed new roles in the teaching-learning process allowing in one hand the students to explore, discover and question themselves about some knowledge and on the other hand the teachers to change to a tutor, a companion and to a student project guide. Therefore, surveys were analyzed, comprising questions about the most significant contribution of the tutor as well as if there are some initial expectations that have not been foreseen by the tutor.

Assessing student individual performance within PBL teams: findings from the implementation of a new mechanism

This paper reports on the experience of the implementation of a new mechanism to assess individual student contribution within project work, where students work in teams to solve a large-scale open-ended interdisciplinary project. The study takes place at the University of Minho, with first year engineering students, enrolled in the Industrial Management and Engineering (Integrated Masters) degree. The aim of this paper is to describe the main principles and procedures underlying the assessment mechanism created and also provide some feedback from its first implementation, based on the students, lecturers and tutors perceptions. For data collection, a survey was sent to all course lecturers and tutors involved in the assessment process. Students also contributed with suggestions, both on a workshop held at the end of the project and also by answering a survey on the overall satisfaction with PBL experience. Findings show a positive level of acceptance of the new mechanism by the students and also by the lecturers and tutors. The study identified the need to clarify the criteria used by the lecturers and the exact role of the tutor, as well as the need for further improvement of its features and procedures. Some recommendations are also issued regarding technical aspects related to some of the steps of the procedures, as well as the need for greater support on the adjustment and final setting of the individual grades.

Relação entre coordenação motora e comportamento sedentário, em crianças

Relatório de atividade profissional de mestrado em Ensino de Educação Física nos Ensinos Básico e Secundário

Global vs. local nonlinear optimization techniques for human-like movement of an anthropomorphic robot

In this paper a comparison between using global and local optimization techniques for solving the problem of generating human-like arm and hand movements for an anthropomorphic dual arm robot is made. Although the objective function involved in each optimization problem is convex, there is no evidence that the admissible regions of these problems are convex sets. For the sequence of movements for which the numerical tests were done there were no significant differences between the optimal solutions obtained using the global and the local techniques. This suggests that the optimal solution obtained using the local solver is indeed a global solution.

Comparing heritage speakers and late L2-learners of European Portuguese: verb movement, VP ellipsis and adverb placement

This study compares the performance of Portuguese-German heritage children and adult L2 speakers of European Portuguese whose L1 is German with respect to two aspects of grammar, adverb placement and VP-ellipsis, which depend on a core syntactic property of the language, verb movement. The results show that both groups have acquired V-to-I and adverb placement, showing no influence of a V2 grammar. Performance in the VP-ellipsis task is more complex: heritage children produce VP-ellipsis at the level of controls, as opposed to L2 speakers; however, both L2 and heritage speakers show that crosslinguistic influence may produce a preference for pronoun substitution over VP-ellipsis in a task asking for redundancy resolution. Nevertheless, given that overall results show that heritage children perform at the level of L1 children, we take our results to support approaches to heritage bilingualism which suggest the development of an intact grammar in childhood.