Teaching Strategies for Cross-Subject Knowledge Acquisition at First Grade in Building Engineering

Abstract

The current European Higher Education Area (EHEA) scenario highlights the need to acquire knowledge and develop a range of skills in terms of academic and professional profiles. The development of transversal skills provides students with a comprehensive education. However, implementation of interdisciplinarity (ID) is unusual in the first semester of the first year in the Building Engineering Degree. In fact, traditionally, Economics and Construction Materials are subjects that belong to different departments and, hence, have been developed as completely independent areas. This has lead students to believe that the relationship between them is nonexistent. Therefore, this paper aims to improve these subjects' learning, through the design, planning and assessment of ID activities. The developed methodology for these activities has been Project Based Learning (PBL) as an inclusive teaching strategy of different knowledge acquired in both subjects. Specifically, the PBL consisted in the development of an entrepreneurial project in the subject of Economics creating a construction materials company. Results show, on one side, PBL methodology as a technique that allows knowledge integration and interdisciplinarity, and moreover, that those student working in teams who wanted to make the crosscutting between different subjects have succeeded.