On the Motivation of Last-year Undergraduate Students: An Academic Experience of Teaching Electric Drives

This paper presents a statistical analysis of the behaviour of last-year undergraduate students facing a pilot experience of teaching electric drives in the University Carlos III of Madrid. The students were offered the possibility of participating as teachers-tutors for their colleagues and other fourth-year students, as a way of reviewing their already-known knowledge of electric machines and testing their capability for information transmission and group management. The administration of the University Carlos III supported this pilot experience as a part of the adaptation process to the Bologna Declaration (based on the Recommendation of the Council 98/561/EC of 24 September 1998), an EU treatment for quality assurance in higher education. The pilot experience took place between October 2005 and January 2006. Beyond technical aspects, the pilot experience revealed a key point: the lack of motivation of students in the absence of a reward and the low motivation level even with quite generous academic rewards. In the opinion of the authors, this problem appears to be inherent in a social structure that forgets basic education and is economically oriented: earning overcomes learning