Considering the results of research on the benefits and difficulties of peer review, this paper describes how teaching faculty, interested in endorsing the acquisition of communication and critical thinking (CT) skills among engineering students, has been implementing a learning methodology throughout online peer review activities. While introducing a new methodology, it is important to weight the advantages found and the conditions that might have restrained the activity outcomes, thereby modulating its overall efficiency. Our results show that several factors are decisive for the success of the methodology: the use of specific and detailed orientation guidelines for CT skills, the students’ training on how to deliver a meaningful feedback, the opportunity to counter-argument, the selection of good assignments’ examples, and the constant teacher's monitoring of the activity. Results also tackle other aspects of the methodology such as the thinking skills evaluation tools (grades and tests) that most suit our reality. An improved methodology is proposed taking in account the encountered limitations, thus offering the possibility to other interested institutions to use/test and/or improve it.

La Estadística se ha incorporado en la mayoría de las carreras universitarias y entre ellas en el grado de psicología donde la enseñanza de conceptos estadísticos presenta problemas didácticos específicos debido a que los estudiantes que lo cursan tienen una base matemática muy heterogénea. En este trabajo nos centramos en el estudio de sus actitudes, por su influencia en el proceso de aprendizaje, y las analizamos a través de la Escala de Actitudes hacia la Estadística de Estrada EAEE (^{ESTRADA, 2002}). Los resultados indican actitudes en general moderadas o positivas, con una puntuación promedio global ligeramente superior a la posición teórica de indiferencia. El curso y los estudios previos en esta materia inciden en su actitud. Destacamos que la actitud global hacia la estadística empeora con los años de estudio, aunque las puntuaciones totales más bajas se presentan en los estudiantes que nunca estudiaron estadística, resultados que invitan a la reflexión sobre la manera que se enseñan en los diferentes niveles educativos.

REICE es una revista de periodicidad trimestral. Su objetivos son: colaborar en la difusión de la investigación educativa que se realiza en Iberoamérica por investigadores Iberoamericanos; Favorecer la utilización de los resultados de la investigación para la mejora de los sistemas educativos, las escuelas y las aulas; Fomentar la realización de investigaciones educativas de calidad.

Critical Thinking (CT) has become a fundamental competence of the 21st century. However, university teachers still face several difficulties in promoting it through their teaching practice, mainly due to the lack of pedagogical training aimed at this purpose. In the scope of the CRITHINKEDU Erasmus+ project, a 5-day European training course for university teachers was held in Rome (Italy) aiming to engage participants with CT teaching practices and to prepare them with the required tools suitable for its development. Some teachers from the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) attended the course as trainees, and later, along with other colleagues, assumed the role of trainers during its replication in Vila Real (Portugal). Through the analysis of a focus group of eight teachers from UTAD, the current exploratory case study aims to understand teachers’ conceptions on CT and characterize how those are integrated in the teaching practices. It also tries to evaluate the impact that both training courses (as trainees and/or trainers) had on their professional development. Preliminary reflections on the implementation of CT teaching practices and the design of teacher's training courses in this field are discussed. Keywords: critical thinking; teaching practice; teacher training; professional development; higher education

In higher education, engineering students have to be prepared for their future jobs, with knowledge but also with several soft skills, among them creativity. In this paper, we present a study carried on with 128 engineering undergraduate students on their understanding of mathematical creativity. The students were in the first year of different engineering first degrees in a north-eastern Portuguese university and we analysed the content of their texts for the question ‘What do you understand by mathematical creativity?’. Data collection was done in the first semester of the academic years 2014/2015 and 2016/2017 in a Linear Algebra course. The results showed that ‘problem solving’ category had the majority of the references in 2014/2015, but not in the academic year 2016/2017 were ‘involving mathematics’ category had the majority. This exploratory study pointed out for ‘problem solving’ and ‘involving mathematics’ categories and gave us hints for teaching mathematics courses in engineering degrees.

There are several educational software (ES) used in the classroom environment for the teaching and learning of geometric contents that are part of the Portuguese basic education mathematics program. There are studies that show that the use of this type of artifact has a fundamental role in the behavior of students, raising, among other aspects, a greater motivation for learning mathematics. The aim of this work is to explore and describe implications for the behavior and learning of students in the 7th grade of Portuguese basic education, in face of a pedagogical practice that involves carrying out tasks using ES Plickers, in the theme similarities of the domain geometry and measurement, throughout intervention carried out. The adopted methodology presents characteristics of a quasi-experimental study. The participants were 61 students from three classes of a school in the north of Portugal, followed during eight consecutive classes. A set of tasks using Plickers, tests and a questionnaire survey were used as instruments for data collection. The results point to positive increments, at a behavioral level, as well as in the evolution of learning, in view of the use of this methodology in the classroom.