Desenvolvimento da aprendizagem sobre estruturas de concreto armado

Abstract

The curricula in Brazilian universities are based on the desired profile of the student and the competences to be developed during the course. Since we are interested in understanding the development of engineering students in structural engineering courses, we chose to describe it through the development of competences in these courses. The development of learning can be described by estimates of educational change obtained through appropriate statistical models, as the linear individual growth model. But this fact requires the construction of metrics to measure the construct of competence. The family of Rasch models was applied to obtain "rulers" to measure competences from the responses of academic tests. Measures of competence were fitted to hierarchical linear models describing the development of general and domain-specific competences of Civil Engineering undergraduate students in structural engineering subjects. The main result was the positive development of the general-domain competence in structural engineering subjects. The results for the specific-domain competence in the discipline of Reinforced Concrete Structures II showed trends with different dynamics, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The trajectories show both positive and negative trends. The decreased trajectories may not necessarily indicate a negative result. They may represent trends prior to the construction of a new competence.