SELF-ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES OF INFINITESIMAL CALCULUS IN THE E-LEARNING AT TECHNICAL DEGREES

Our aim in this work is to construct, to implement and later to analyze its influence, of a self-assessment tool for the e-learning of fundamental mathematical subjects in engineering degrees. The difficulty of specific issues as differential and integral calculus, and therefore the need to develop attractive ways to teach them, has led us to design a wide question bank supported by Moodle about different aspect of the infinitesimal calculus. It is constituted by a wide set of different kind of questions (yes/no, check boxes, matching, calculated, multiple choice, numerical) regarding to the following lessons:
1. Foundations of real analysis, notions of limits limits and continuity, discontinuities; limits of sums, products, quotients, compositions.
2. Differentiation: l'Hôpital's rule; definition of derivative and higher derivatives; derivatives of implicit and parametric functions; graphics.
3. Integration and applications: definite and indefinite integrals; fundamental theorem of calculus; techniques for integration area between curves, lengths of curves (including polar coordinates), surfaces and volumes of revolution.

We have stablished this designed tool in the subject of Mathematics I in the Civil Engineering Degree of the University of Extremadura, and it were welcomed by students as a novel way to guess their own knowledge. Although initially the self-assessment results weren`t positive, at the end of the course, the method was revealed as a successful way of learning, in the sense that it made the students aware of their respective knowledge deficiencies in certain aspects of the subject. At this aspect, specific results for a population sample of eighty students of the course 2012-13 are processed and compared with the final achievements.