PERCEPTION ON THE CONTRIBUTION OF INTERACTIVE AND EXPERIMENTAL LEARNING OBJECTS TO THE MANAGEMENT OF LEARNING IN DISCRETE MATHEMATICS

The disciplines of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) degree programs are a priority for both developed and developing countries (Kumar, 2017). These are highly complex, and their apprehension for students is difficult, hence learning content must be developed in a way that reflects the links between science, technology and the surrounding world, in order to achieve greater significance as well as greater engagement in students towards these careers that will contribute to the drop in rates of dropout and school failure.

Consequently, students should be given access to educational resources that enable them to effectively manage learning content, thereby making them meaningful. Educational technologies, in the new models of training centered on the student, the management of knowledge and learning from increasingly developed tools, techniques and methods. Through their high potential for visualization, experimentation and interactivity, they favor the creation of scenarios suitable for this purpose. The objective of the present work was to describe the student's perception of the incorporation of interactive and experimental learning objects (OA-IE) (García, 2014) in the teaching and learning process of Discrete Mathematics, to contribute to the development of content management capacity.

The study was developed with students of first year of the University of Informatics Sciences (UCI), Cuba. A population of 214 students was considered, of which 108 conformed the sample, distributed in 4 groups statistically equivalent. They were applied a quasi-experimental design of 4 groups of Solomon (Sampieri, 2014) with 2 experimental groups and 2 of control, with pretest and postest. As a quantitative data collection technique, questionnaires measured through the Likert scales were used to determine the students' perception of the use of OA-IE and how they consider themselves to be self-managing content. On the other hand, qualitative observation with an active participation of the teacher, allowed to explore the relationships and interactions that are established during the process. For the analysis of the quantitative results the percentage, mean and standard deviation of the items of the questionnaire were analyzed, with satisfactory results being obtained in most cases. The observation allowed to identify difficulties in the planning of teamwork, communication skills and resistance to change produced by the introduction of treated educational resources.