Guidance to students in Spanish public university degrees

Abstract

Introduction. University orientation is part of the educational process, understood as a set of actions aimed at providing continuous, systematic, planned and organized help to students by the institution. In Spain, university orientation is framed in the training model of the European Higher Education Area, assuming a change of model and giving students an active role in their own training. The objective of this research has been to describe the support and guidance systems for students included in the design of the new university degrees, prepared since 2007. Method. An investigation has been developed based on the content analysis of the verification reports. The sample collected is 380 degrees verification reports from Spanish public universities, selected by a stratified random sample of proportional allocation by university and branch. The verification memories were analyzed using the MAXQDA program, encoding 44,208 segments. Likewise, a quantitative analysis was carried out with the SPSS v.26 program to determine the differences by year and branch. Results. Attention to the academic dimension is a more extended action, covering the objectives of guiding and informing. The actions are mainly institutional initiatives, being widely implemented those aimed at groups of students, especially new entrants and in the first years of university. The implementation of actions aimed at students with specific educational needs has increased. Discussion. Spanish public universities carry out actions to support and guide students, verifying the improvement in the last decade based on previous analysis of needs. While the attention to groups of students is widely extended, it seems necessary to advance in the attention to the specific needs of each individual.