Objective: This article is the second paper in a series about competency-based education. Now the authors examined prior definition of the term competence, reveled many of those features driving the notion out of its real significance for university education and proposed a new definition. Methods: The authors rely on theoretical methods to assess prior definitions, its components and limitations in the context of higher education. Results: The study reveals prior definitions limitations together with its negative effect for professional training and devises a new definition by means a dialectical synthesis leading to a full comprehension of the pedagogical nature of the term competence. Conclusions: Most of prior definitions identify competence with other pedagogical categories such as skills, abilities or capacity and neglect the axiological component of education and the role of social mediation in learning. The proposed definition focuses learning results on the basis of students’ performance and achievements, the procedures they internalized, and the individual values and the configured personality features permitting continuous autonomous and responsible learning.

Objective: This article is the second paper in a series about competency-based education. Now the authors examined prior definition of the term competence, reveled many of those features driving the notion out of its real significance for university education and proposed a new definition. Methods: The authors rely on theoretical methods to assess prior definitions, its components and limitations in the context of higher education. Results: The study reveals prior definitions limitations together with its negative effect for professional training and devises a new definition by means a dialectical synthesis leading to a full comprehension of the pedagogical nature of the term competence. Conclusions: Most of prior definitions identify competence with other pedagogical categories such as skills, abilities or capacity and neglect the axiological component of education and the role of social mediation in learning. The proposed definition focuses learning results on the basis of students’ performance and achievements, the procedures they internalized, and the individual values and the configured personality features permitting continuous autonomous and responsible learning.

Objective: The Dunning-Kruger effect is the cognitive bias by which incompetent individuals overestimate their own abilities or underestimate others. This paper aims at describing the effect of the professors feedback on individual self-assessment of their individuals potentials. Methods: The study is a quantitative, quasi-experimental and descriptive research. First, the cognitive bias in the self-evaluation-real performance of bad students was compared to good students (first VI), "Neurophysiology", third semester class. Then, after receiving teachers feedback, participants were given a second test for assessing a second variable. Results: The findings point out that there is a Dunning-Kruger effect showing a significantly greater cognitive bias in the self-evaluation between bad students and good students. For the second test (after the systematic teachers feedback of individual errors, this effect between disappears, both in bad students and good students. Furthermore, there is a significant decrease in this cognitive self-assessment bias in the group of poor students between the first test and second test. Conclusion: This study shows that there is a Dunning-Kruger effect in the educational context and a dependency on the feedback given by the professor, due to the students inability to be aware of their own knowledge (which prevents their progress).

Objective: This article explores various conceptual approaches about teaching-learning process of the construction of written texts, when a certain space is required, which is reached by a systematization of the studies of other specialties, without background found. Methods: The methods used were historical-logical, analytical-synthetic, inductive-deductive, ascent from the abstract to the concrete, Systemic-structural and systematization. These methods allowed penetrating the essence of the problem identified, analyzing and processing the theory about the fundamentals were used of the direction of the teaching-learning process of the construction of written texts and the teaching of the notion of space.Results: The fundamental result is didactic resources for textual spatiality, understood as the set of teaching techniques, procedures and materials made available to teaching activities to diversify learning, and enhance teaching methods for the distribution of space in said process. Conclusion: The conceptualization and the methodological procedure are contributions to the didactics of the construction of written texts when is required a specific space.Keywords: professional, didactic procedure, construction of written texts

Objetivo: O presente artigo tem o objetivo de contextualizar a educação especial nas últimas décadas, como um desafio para o Estado do Amazonas, sobretudo no diz respeito à formação de professores nas diversas áreas para atenderem a nova demanda que se encontra nos espaços escolares: os alunos com necessidade educacionais especiais. Métodos: A partir da revisão documental, analisou-se a legislação brasileira em educação especial, e a bibliografia em educação especial e formação inicial de professores para o atendimento de alunos com necessidade educacionais especiais, o levantamento do Programa Pedagógico do Curso (PPC) de cursos de licenciatura de universidades públicas e privadas do estado do Amazonas. Resultados: O resultado apontou que, no universo de oito universidade do Estado do Amazonas selecionadas pela pesquisa, somente uma universidade traz o tema educação especial no Programa Pedagógico do Curso de dois cursos: Pedagogia e Normal Superior. Conclusão: Os alunos com NEE estão se inserindo nas demais modalidades de ensino, estão saindo da educação infantil chegando ao ensino médio, e outros até ao ensino superior. São mediante a estas questões que refletir e discutir a respeito da formação inicial do professor do ensino básico neste percurso da educação especial na perspectiva da inclusão, tornando-se necessário para este processo transformação dos espaços socioeducacionais. Portanto, o desafio no contexto regional é [re]pensar a formação docente a partir do movimento da política de inclusão, pois é indubitável a necessidade de preparar o professor para nova realidade escolar. Isso acontecerá reestruturarmos os projetos pedagógicos de cursos que norteiam a formação docente.

Objective: The paper aims at completing a comprehensive assessment of OTEPMI website, devised as didactic tool for patriotic education at the University of Camagüey. Methods: The authors rely on analysis and synthesis, inductive and deductive methods and documentary analysis to process information, identifying characteristic features, recognizing relations between structural components and reaching at partial and final conclusions. They submit the website to the assessment of expertise professionals and survey professors and students to explore satisfaction. Results: The findings describe the website devised for patriotic education at the University of Camagüey, the results of it professional assessment, and information related to teachers’ and students’ satisfaction. Conclusions: Both professors and students graded the website functional descriptors between useful and indispensable, the satisfaction questionaries’ given confirmed such results.

Objective: It offers a methodology for the training of professional competences in university students which, unlike other consulted, reveals as a scientific novelty the establishment of a dynamic based on the design, development and evaluation of training projects as a form of organization that integrates the academic component with the labor and research, from the instructive, educational and developmental dimension. Methods: Documentary analysis was used for the characterization of the theoretical framework, the background and state of the art, systemic approach for the elaboration of the methodology, pedagogical pre-experiment and the Chi-Square hypothesis test (X2), for the assessment of its feasibility and relevance. Results: Favorable impacts are shown with the application of the methodology in a sample of 60 students of the Mechanical Engineering degree at the University of Holguin, Cuba, in the improvement of their professional skills, as well as in productivity and quality of life of workers of the companies where they developed the training projects, which attest to the scientific novelty of the research. Conclusion: The training of professional competences constitutes a more integrative approach to the formation of the professional, it requires the establishment of a methodology based on formative projects that integrate the academy with the labor practice and the work of research and technological innovation directed by the instructional, educational dimension and developing, as well as by the use of problem learning methods. It can be applied in university careers at national and foreign level with the appropriate adjustments.

Objective: The study aims at describing an alternative students’ contest at the Cuban Junior High School, as a way to raise the levels of student’s participation. Methods: Theoretical methods were used such as the system approach and the analysis and synthesis for the construction of a referential framework, the induction deduction to evaluate the most significant causes that influence the current state of junior high school contests. Empirical methods such as the interview, the survey and the participant observation were used to assess the introduction in the school practice of the new proposal and recording its evolution. Results: The feasibility of the proposal is demonstrated through its experimentation in educational practice, the main theoretical and methodological elements that support it are revealed and the necessary indicators to evaluate the transformation are based. Conclusions: It is possible to optimize the functioning and impact of the OPJM in junior high schools by putting into practice a new contest system that promotes active participation in school processes.

Objective: The paper aims at describing a pedagogical conception that contributes to the process of doctoral training in Education at "Gaspar Jorge García Galló" Center for Education Studies at "Marta Abreu" Central University of Las Villas. Methods: The dialectical-materialistic method is assumed in its unit of the theoretical and empirical approaches, and the qualitative and quantitative methods; information was collected by data analysis, participant observation, documentary analysis and statistical processing displayed in tables and graphs. Result: The main finding is the description of the doctoral program in Education devised at the UCLV and its underlying theoretical framework by accounting the descriptors followed in the study: program structure, program research component, program execution and scientific retrieval potentials. Conclusion: The devised program is effective for the doctoral training process, it makes possible to increase the results in doctoral training, increases the research competencies and innovative capacities of graduates, causing a positive impact in the regional educational system and society. The program has been certified as excellent by the Junta Central of Acreditación (National Cortication Board) and awarded by the AUIP in 2018.

Objective: This article seeks to explore the particularities of the process of integral sexuality education from psychosocial skills in Cuban adolescents. Methods: Historical-logical, analytical-synthetic methods were used, documentary analysis and interviewing key informants based on the use of the following indicators: conception of sexual education, contents that are treated primarily for the education of sexuality from the psychosocial skills training and the ways that are used to sexually educate teenagers. Results: The study revealed the stages and trends in the historical progress of the integral education of sexuality from psychosocial skills in Cuban adolescents, as well as the main features that characterized each of them. Conclusion: As of the last decade of the twentieth century, the importance of the formation of psychosocial skills as part of the process of integral education of sexuality in the adolescent stage to prevent behaviors is just beginning to become aware in the Cuban Educational System risky.

Objective: This article aims at exploring senior high school students’ attitude towards mathematics before and after of introducing a virtual learning environment (VLE). Methods: The exploring of students’ attitude towards mathematics was completed by surveying a sample of students of “República Bolivariana de Venezuela” High School at the town of Florida in Camagüey province. After the introduction of VLE tools in teaching the topic of statistics, the initial exploration was repeated. Results: The findings include a proposal of attitude descriptors and the description of the impact of VLE in motivation. Conclusions: The use of VLE supported on personal cellphones in teaching mathematics fosters motivation and learning.

Objective: ICT supported education in primary school is more than suggesting how to use educational software or encyclopedias, its inclusion presupposes to devise a teaching-educational process that assumes the retrieval of digital information as one of the skills to be developed since the first grades. This article aims at describing the structure of the ability to retrieve digital information in primary school third cycle, as well as the criteria for its evaluation. Methods: The theoretical scientific methods of analysis-synthesis and induction-deduction were used, the authors also rely on the documentary analysis and non-structured conversational interviewing. Result: The main finding is the operationalization of digital information retrieval ability, together with the criteria for evaluating information in primary school third cycle. Conclusion: The quality achievement in digital information recovering is achieved when the students manage to figure out their needs for digital information, and is able to locate, evaluate information and self-assessing the whole process.

Objective: This article aims at promoting critical thinking on mathematics relevance in times of COVID-19, its challenges and implications to make teaching and learning closing to actual events. Methods: The authoress rely mainly on documentary analysis assisted by analytic and synthetic procedures. Results: Arguments to prove the relevance of Mathematics for society are given; its role to understand and transform the surrounding reality, specifically, those related to COVID-19. Likewise, the authoress devises the essential didactic guidelines for teaching Math in present-day context. Conclusions: The instrumental and educative character of mathematic concepts for modern society poses a challenge for teaching and learning to improve the quality of life. This challenge demands teacher’s commitment and awareness of their decisive role in achieving such goals.