The mass production paradigm on which much of the industry was based has changed. The market is increasingly demanding, requesting diversity and products that are more and more adapted to personal wishes and requirements. This implies producing a greater diversity of products in smaller quantities. Competitiveness is enormous, which forces most companies to be truly effective and efficient, taking care of product quality, delivery time, and final cost. Lean methodologies have been a valuable aid in this field. The diversity of Lean tools has been shown to have answers to the most diverse challenges, and companies are aware of this, increasingly adopting methodologies and processes that aim to progressively reduce waste and adapting their production paradigm to what the market requires. This work intends to provide a vision, as global as possible, of the pathway of Lean implementation in the Portuguese industry. For this purpose, a survey was carried out with a significant sample of Portuguese industrial companies from a wide range of activity sectors. The data collected through the survey were treated statistically, and then a SWOT analysis of the results was performed, which provided a collection of precious information on the evolution of industrial companies in Portugal.

The globalization and the high-speed development of the digital era, the mixed of technological, economic and societal cultures and the wide-range of the socio-economic world, boost deep transformations daily on every human being. In particular, students need to acquire personal and professional skills to be successful. Enterprises are looking for individual's knowledge but also for individual's contribution to the whole, to the culture of the organization, and the self-perspective an individual brings to the company. These issues may induce a great impact in the teaching process. Single-based knowledge, focused on compartmental subjects did not work in the past, currently fails and probably will not meet future needs. Teaching must be thought continuously as a system of overlapping and interrelated ideas and scientific areas, rather than isolated and different fields of knowledge. In this sense, students need professors with `personal and professional qualities assuming the students' independence in decision-making, the ability to act in difficult situations and the ability for individual study' [19]. The implementation of new teaching methodologies, namely active-learning (AL) [3], [5], [13], in engineering courses may help students develop soft skills, viz. self-motivation to learn, cognitive flexibility, leadership, ability to work under pressure and time management, negotiation and conflict resolution [8], [15], [11]. In this paper, we will discuss the students' perceptions on how the implementation of AL techniques in Math courses in Engineering Bachelor Degrees at the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic of Porto, promote the development of the soft skills, needed in their personal and future professional lives.

The concept of cultural intelligence has been the object of increasing attention from the scientific community due to its importance in a globalized world. To fulfil their mission, higher education institutions need individuals capable of effectively interacting with others who come from different cultural backgrounds. This study analyzes the level of cultural intelligence and its background in a Portuguese engineering higher education institution. This study used a cultural intelligence scale and applied it to a sample of 445 participants. The results show that individuals in this Portuguese institution have an interesting level of awareness of others’ cultural preferences. However, particular attention should be paid to improving the outcome of the cognitive dimension. The results show the potential of international experiences and activities that foster cultural exposure. Consequently, the managers of institutions should make efforts to promote Erasmus programs or similar internships abroad. In addition, they should promote activities that foster multicultural contact, whether extracurricular activities or multicultural clubs or associations, meetings, lectures or classes with appropriate pedagogical methodologies, for example, experiential or collaborative teaching.

Information about the paper titled "ACTIVE LEARNING: SELF-MOTIVATION IN MATH COURSES" at IATED Digital Library

Journal of Anthropology and Archaeology is a peer-reviewed international journal, which publishes original papers promoting theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in the discipline of socio-cultural anthropology.