Issue 20, February 2017

The evaluation by peers is one of the assessment strategies that can be uses to promote active student learning. In this work we describe the experience introduced in the course of Public Finance in the degrees of Economy and Economy-International Relations at the Rey Juan Carlos University in order to achieve greater involvement of students in their learning. The proposal consists in the introduction of peer assessment to value activities with the support of rubrics. This strategy has sought to strengthen generic skills of the subject. These assessments have been both employed I the classroom and through e-learning platform Moodle. The results show an improvement in academic performance and confirm that peer assessment can be an effective lifelong learning strategy.

The aim of this work is to provide an overview of the basic issues of the financial education programs, with some references to Spain as a supplement. Firstly the recent process of take off and expansion of such programs at an international level is under review. Afterwards the main conceptual and methodological issues concerning financial education are addressed. The work also focuses on the economic rationale for financial education programs as well as on the measurement of financial literacy and the information available. Finally, the implementation of financial education programs is approached and also some caveats about their effectiveness are added.

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.

The main objective of the authors of this book, preface written by Fernando González Laxe, has been to carry out an analysis of the effects of austerity economic policies implemented after the economic crisis. Specifically, the authors’ concern has been health policy, paying special attention to the collective of the immigrant population in Spain. The scientific rigor of the treatment, the clarity in the exhibition of contents and the interest in offering an informative synthesis of the results, make of this book a useful tool both to know the subject in question and also for taking advantage of it for educational purposes.