What do undergraduate students expect and/or know ex-ante from Public Economics?: Relevance to learning

The presence of the public sector in the daily life of advanced societies may lead us to think that both the initial positions and the relevance assigned by students to the concepts studied in a subject such as the Public Economy have a great relevance to determine how their learning process is developed, since daily life should have already allowed them to do so. However, sometimes this process of cognitive internalization seems to be far from the level that would be expected and desirable. So, how much of this perception is real?, how and when could this capacity of assimilation of everyday knowledge be improved on the presence of the public sector in the society?. This article presents a pilot experiment, essentially experimental, carried out with the objective of answering both questions. Our results allow us to affirm that students have a relatively clear idea of the fundamental contents of the subject at the initial moment ("search effect" apart), but they do not present a good predisposition towards their study. In addition, they do not usually access to sources of information where they could find, on a continuous basis, clarifying examples of the concepts involved. Likewise, it can be identified how the subject allows to develop and assimilate the fundamental concepts studied. Finally, we were able to establish that the students assimilated the concepts studied, improved their predisposition towards the study of these subjects, although with room for improvement. Unfortunately, we did not observe a significant change in the frequency of accesses to the sources of information available.