Gracias al desarrollo del aprendizaje basado en competencias, se ha producido un gran interés por el pensamiento crítico en la educación superior. La empleabilidad, por otra parte, ha influido poderosamente en su protagonismo como competencia imprescindible en el desarrollo profesional en un entorno innovador. Diversos autores han estudiado el concepto de pensamiento crítico y los procesos implicados en su desarrollo y formación. El presente artículo analiza qué entienden los docentes universitarios por pensamiento crítico y la importancia que conceden al mismo. Es una investigación mixta cuantitativa/cualitativa, con 230 docentes universitarios, que desvela interesantes resultados, como que la mayoría lo vinculan a procesos de análisis y razonamiento, algunos al cuestionamiento, evaluación y toma de decisiones y muy pocos lo entienden como acción y compromiso, siendo para todos un aspecto muy importante de la formación universitaria. Estos resultados tienen grandes implicaciones para la enseñanza-aprendizaje del pensamiento crítico en la educación superior.

The objective of this work was to take a close look at the profile of the digital competence of pre-service early childhood and primary school teachers. To this end, 200 students from Education degrees participated in filling out the Perceptions Questionnaire on Digital Competence. The results show that future teachers present a medium level of digital competence and have some difficulties with the dimension related to the creation of content. Also, results show how over the years, and sometimes over the courses, the dimensions of teaching digital competence improve significantly. No significant differences were found regarding type of university and gender. These results have important implications for curriculum design and teacher training regarding digital competence development in pre-service teachers.

Developing critical thinking skills appears to be a challenge for higher education institutions. However, little is known about the students’ points of view regarding the methodologies they consider to foster the development of this competence. To answer this question, a total of 263 Spanish university students participated in this study and were asked what they understood by critical thinking and the methodologies they considered to be the most effective for developing it. The results indicated that, based on students’ points of view, there were six methodologies that mainly contributed to developing critical thinking: Debates, project-based learning, practices in real contexts, doing research, cooperative learning, and case studies. These results were unanimous regardless of the student’s understanding of critical thinking: Analyzing/organizing, reasoning/arguing, questioning/asking oneself, evaluating, taking a position/taking a decision, compromising/acting. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications for teachers and educational institutions in relation to the development of critical thinking in higher education.

Universities are increasingly paying more attention to developing academic entrepreneurship. This paper analyses the existing relationships between the relevant factors that contribute to the development of the entrepreneurial university. A previously validated questionnaire was administered to a sample of 84 deans of a number of faculties in Spain. The aim was to assess the universities’ development in terms of 13 influencing factors in encouraging entrepreneurship. The findings show that universities’ contextual factors had only minor influence on internal factors. Internal resources were found to be moderately or highly correlated with the processes put in place by universities to promote entrepreneurship. In particular, reference to entrepreneurship in a university’s mission, strategy, policies and procedures had a correlation with all the entrepreneurship factors analysed. Support from the management team and organisational design were not among the most important factors; however, they were positively associated with training and research processes, which, in turn, seemed to be strongly related to all factors in the development of the entrepreneurial university, especially with university mission and strategy. The findings show the relationships between the factors involved in the development of the entrepreneurial university. This will help universities to adopt measures that are better suited to promoting entrepreneurship.

In our globalised, pluralistic, and often information-swamped society, critical thinking is recognised as an important competence to be developed in university education. In order to investigate this, 142 Latin American and Spanish teachers were asked about the importance of and potential for developing critical thinking in university education. Their responses were subjected to an inductive analysis, which lead to 13 categories about the reasons why it is important, and 11 categories about the potential and limitations for developing it in university education. These categories were found to remain statistically unchanged regardless of age, years of teaching experience, area of knowledge, gender and geographical area. Results show that teachers consider important to teach critical thinking at university and mainly for students to become good professionals in a complex world. Teachers believe it is possible to teach it, as long as active methodologies are used, in addition to other reasons, such as taking into account the lack of interest and preparation about critical thinking that students bring to university. Getting to know university teacher´s views about the importance and possibilities of teaching and learning critical thinking is crucial for the establishment of meaningful curriculum plans and learning activities for its development.