The Kolb model is widely used to analyze the learning style of engineering students; however, there are no published studies carried out in Portugal. This study was applied to students who had just began there courses at a Portuguese engineering school. This study object is to assess whether there is a clearly majority learning style; whether there are differences in the learning style among all students and between students in the industrial management course and those in the technological engineering courses. The results allow the pedagogical practice improvement in the classroom regarding the effectiveness increase of the teaching process. This study results also allow improving the way students approach the study, overcoming difficulties in understanding the topics studied, improving the construction of their skills and increasing the quality of the learning process.

An essential aspect of higher education institutions’ academic curricula for engineering courses is the students’ industrial internship programs. In the literature, it is well accepted that such programs provide valuable learning outcomes and increase the graduates’ employment prospects. Thus, it is paramount to evaluate the internship programs’ quality to identify opportunities to improve their design and implementation. However, that evaluation typically depends on self-designed academic assessment surveys of questionable validity. The purpose of this paper is to assess engineering students’ perceptions of their internship experiences. For that purpose, the validation of a recently adapted version of the Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ) was carried out on a sample of 447 engineering students that participated in industrial internship programs offered by Portuguese public universities and polytechnic schools. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to confirm the suitability of the model proposed by the WEQ’s authors on this study’s sample. The psychometric qualities were evaluated through convergent and discriminant validity. The results showed that the model fit the sample well, and convergent and discriminant validity was established. The general competencies subscale was the most important for the participants—specifically, the competency of solving problems. Differences concerning the WEQ and gender, company size, and compensation were found and discussed. This study provides researchers in the field with a new tool validated explicitly for engineering students.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the degree of internationalization of Iberian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and the factors that influence their internationalization process. The study begins with the contextualization of the HEI internationalization process through a brief historical synthesis and the establishment of the levels of analysis of this process, to focus, in more detail, the organizational level. To this end, it is supported in an organization dimensions model to define the components of the internationalization process and the data collection by questionnaire. The results were processed for each of its components, and the degree of internationalization was obtained by calculating the mean values of the components total. The study concludes that the Iberian HEIs have an interesting level of internationalization, which is higher for institutions with more than 5.000 students, with simultaneous focus on teaching and research, conferring the master's and doctor's degrees.

The study object of the research described in this chapter is the internationalization of the public university both in Portugal and Spain. In this research, these countries' university is modeled as an open system in which the institutional and national levels are highlighted. The regional and global levels are indirectly considered by the influence they have on the national and institutional levels. A two-fold analysis was conducted: first, a preliminary qualitative one about the present situation of both Spanish and Portuguese public universities internationalization, based on the available official data sources; second, the quantitative analysis of the results got in the responded questionnaires. This study may contribute to understanding of the nature of Portuguese and Spanish public universities' internationalization process as well as the guidelines that may better contribute to reinforce their internationalization.