General description
The European Convergence process demands that the universities prepare their future graduates, among other aspects, to be respectful, responsible and participative citizens, guided by justice, solidarity and the common good, and above any personal interests (Campus Compact, 1999; Egerton, 2002). On this point, in the 1999 Bologna Declaration, the European Ministers of Education specified a series of objectives to be reached in order to consolidate and enrich European people by giving university students the necessary competences for the development and strengthening of their intellectual, cultural, social, scientific and technological skills. These competences, as stated in Royal Decree 1393/2007, shall be stipulated in every study plan, whether general, specific or cross-curricular; they shall also take into account the fact that the term competence is a complex and integrating one which includes knowledge, attitudes and skills (Naval, 2009; Veldhuis, 1997).
Moreover, the 2007 Organic Law on Universities introduces the possibility of receiving academic acknowledgement for student participation in cultural, sporting, student representation, solidarity and cooperative activities (Art. 46.i). For this reason, study plans must take education on these activities into account (Royal Decree 1393/2007, Art. 3.5).
The study we present focuses precisely on this social and civic facet of higher education (Ugarte, Repáraz y Naval, 2010). We believe that the core of civic learning is, without a doubt, the degree of citizen participation. Our study intends to measure the index of student civic commitment, in our case, in the university area.
Thus the aims of our study are as follows:
1. To verify if the students take part in participative activities with academic acknowledgement.
2. To determine their main reason for participating.
3. To establish whether the results change depending on the type of studies and gender of the students.
4. To discover if the attitudinal component is what most affects participation within the index of civic commitment.
Therefore, in this work we propose that university education should have a cross-curricular effect on students’ civic formation (Hartley, 2010; Llano, 2003). We believe that, to do so, university students should possess civic knowledge which will a permit them to be educated within guidelines for action, and to develop the attitudes and competences which will truly lead them to participate and cooperate in society. This implies a knowledge and know-how that allows for coexistence with others and is based on understanding life.
