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student is integrated into the proposed activity or uses the technical resource in
question. The development of teaching options should include the articulation of
learning aims with the contents and the orientation towards skills to be created or
developed. The crucial issue is the adequacy of strategies to the targeted aims and
skills. And, in a constructivist perspective, it is to develop the process of teaching and
learning as a project partaken by the student and rooted in the concrete conditions of
learning to be achieved. Understanding thus education implies the relativism of the
dichotomies that deplete the reality analysed [8], [9].
1.3
Active Learning
Taking into account a certain opposition between the behaviourist model, on the one
hand, and the cognitive and constructivist models of the learning theories, on the
other, it is questionable the belief, common among many teachers, that the student is
just by listening to an explanation or to look at the resolution of a question by a
teacher, that he is conducting an active learning [10]. On the contrary, as maintained
by Bonwell and Eison [11], in an active learning, students engage in the tasks,
mobilising mental operations of high cognitive level. The teaching is focused less in
the organization of stimulating situations targeting the receptors, the students, and
more in the organization of problem solving situations or in strategies of discovery, of
debate, in which students engage and develop, with relative autonomy, the skills
required by the task itself [12].
2
Methodological Options
In order to identify the educational perceptions of students and teachers in Higher
Education, the following question was prompted: What is the teaching perception of
teachers and students in the curricular unit (CU) observed?
A total of 20 hours of classes were attended by the researcher, of a second cycle of
a Master in Psychology, in which students have 100% of approval.
The researcher who attended the classes had a preliminary meeting with the
Coordinator of the CU, in order to clarify the purposes and procedures of classroom
observation. Through an institutional platform, teachers and students were informed
about the reason for the presence of the researcher in the classroom, so that the
researcher's presence was "ignored" and, thus, avoiding being a disturbing element of
the normal classroom management. The researcher also adopted a low profile, aiming
at an unobtrusive observational behaviour.
The observed CU classes were composed of a two-hour class, once a week and 72
students attended the amphitheatre classroom.
The CU is integrated into the curriculum of an integrated Masters. In the CU, the
analysis of a topic is stimulated in various points of view, teaching is geared having in
mind the logic of learning for a future career context, giving relevance to the student's
activity in building the knowledge and in developing skills, which the student is
supposed to acquire, suitably accompanied and supported by the teacher (as set out in
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