The universalization of teaching has placed the educational system in a new situation. On the one hand, it is directed to a public which is characterized by the variety, which leads to design learning situations keeping in mind this diversity. On the other hand, in a society of communication and information like the one we are living, the challenge is not to facilitate the access to the information but to turn this information into knowledge.

To consider education as a process which seeks the autonomy and the construction on the part of the subject of knowledge, procedures and strategies, attitudes and values leads us to conceive the school as a meeting place in which a group of students and a teacher want to build up their own history. This conception suggests that present-day school can not work in the way it does to attend the needs of students and the capacities which have to be developed in a society of information and knowledge.

Our research is based upon a case study which analyses the differences produced in the learning processes which are developed from two different teaching conceptions: the construction of knowledge from a constructivist perspective based on project works, and the traditional teaching conception based on the use of text books.

Project works constitute a conception based on listening to the subject, promoting the desire of learning, and the cooperative work among the different educational agents. This conception incites the use of multiple languages: oral, corporal, written… and brings into play many capacities: to talk, to agree, to choose, to plan, to understand… (Martín Rodrigo, 2006:2). The learning developed by means of text books is based on contents already selected by the publishing house which understands that some topics are “supposedly” the nearest to the world of the children or are the ones which they are going to find when they relate to others or the enviroment, always from the perspective of the adult. The languages and capacities worked through text books are divided into the different didactic units and areas and they generally lie in memorizing, reproducing, copying, completing and filling, without leading necessarily to a meaningful and relevant learning.

In the study we present the subject of research carried out her stage in Infantile Education following a constructivist methodology based on project works. She acquired a series of capacities related to the different fields of that stage. When she went on to the first course of Primary Education, the methodology followed was based on the use of text books and, therefore, on a traditional conception of teaching and learning. The learning and also the capacities developed in this educational stage are diametrically different from the ones in the previous stage. We can even state that there has been a setback in the capacities related to reading and writing and in those attached to the search, selection and classification of information. There has also been a regression in attitudes related to interest, motivation and autonomous learning.

In short, the conclusion revealed in our case study is that the use of project works or text books as organizing elements of the educational activity is not only the reflection of two different methodologies, but two global conceptions of education, two perceptions of the curriculum and the learning processes and, finally, two ways of representing and facing the world.