INQUIRY-BASED APPROACH TO ENHANCE STUDENT LEARNING. CASE STUDY IN FOOD ENGINEERING EDUCATION

In this paper, an application in the food engineering higher education of an inquiry based method, named Learning-By-Design method (LBD), is presented. The students are asked to develop individually new sugar-based products following some steps distributed on four levels. The first level has as main direction to establish the basis knowledge and rules in working at the obtaining of a new sugar-based product. At the second level, after a preliminary training with the teacher (when all the steps arc presented, discusses and simulated), team of students work alone at the production of their own new product by concept development, product and technology design, product obtaining and analysis, labelling and packaging. During the third level, each team presents the final products to the colleagues who analyse and discuss the concept, the product itself and the marketing approach. The assessment is realised at the four levels and is focused on the analysis of the behaviour in the context of the group, the use of prior knowledge and of science terms The results show that the LBD approach is suitable for teaching the students to solve of a complex problem, the obtaining of a new sugar-based product, with improvement of the behaviour in the context of the group, of the use of prior knowledge and of self-checking and control. The use of science terms is not stimulated by this approach.