Abstract:

This study explains an innovative teaching activity carried out in two Finance subjects of the Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and Management at the University of Murcia. It is an active learning strategy designed with the aim to help students to review the syllabus in a different and motivating way. The subjects in question were Financial Management I, taught in the third year, and Advanced Financial Economics, taught in the fourth year of the degree. Specifically, quizzes with multiple choice questions created with the Socrative application and answered using mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) in real time during class were held between teams. Prior to the quiz, this innovative teaching initiative includes an activity for the students to prepare multiple choice questions, with which the targeted active learning strategy becomes more complete.

So, in the first phase of the activity, students have to prepare a series of questions in small work groups which, later, will compete with one another in a quiz in the classroom, carried out through the Socrative application.

The first part of the procedure is very important, as the preparation of questions with a certain level of difficulty obliges students to look in depth at the material, in addition to which they will have to use transversal competencies such as clarity in explaining, correct spelling or team work. In our case, preparing the questions was presented to the students as a voluntary task and, nevertheless, obtained a high level of response. We think that the fact that the task was part of the quiz served as an extra motivation for students. It is also important to know that the lecturer is going to review the questions and return them corrected, which increases their motivation to hand them in and, without doubt, makes the learning strategy more effective.

The second part of the activity, i.e. the pooling of questions selected by the lecturer through a Socrative quiz between the different teams, involves the active participation of the students in the classroom and their self-assessment in a fun way. During the quiz, students were excited and involved in the activity, which could be confirmed later with their answers to the satisfaction survey, in which there was an overwhelming agreement on the suitability of using this methodology more often.

These opinions have shown us that the activity designed presents the advantages of improving the atmosphere in class and the attitude of the students towards the subject and that the students felt it was a good tool with which to review and strengthen their knowledge of concepts as well as to detect possible errors in learning.

Due to such a positive response by the students, the aim is to proceed with the introduction of this methodology to other Finance subjects. Furthermore, this innovative teaching initiative may be easily exportable to other subjects and degrees, the advantage being that it can be used both with small groups of students and with larger groups.

Keywords:

Socrative, quizzes, gamification, active learning, Business Administration, self-assessment.