Abstract:

In the Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Mexican Private University, one of the graduation requirements for higher education students, is to complete 480 hours of social service. Social Service Department provides projects with social assistance foundations, so that, students go weekly to these foundations to work these required hours. Often, the students carry out activities that do not develop their career competencies. However, in the Microbiology Laboratory class, which belongs to Biotechnology Engineering, was decided to change this situation and supply to the students with real-life problems to make experiential learning and make them conscious of their social environment.

For that reason, several microbiological samplings were conducted over nine years in 15 foundations of social assistance, and in a rural community, all these experimentations were carried out in the Campus Estado de Mexico (for its acronym in Spanish CEM). The educational intention was to improve the performance of students coursed the Microbiology Laboratory class while giving the students more tools to solve situations and develop their skills and competencies related to their career.

For this, the final grades obtained from CEM students were compared with those obtained from the Campus Chihuahua (known as CUU) students who coursed the same class and did not have any experiential learning. Besides, the total amount of social service hours worked by all students was obtained.

An increment in the final grades obtained by CEM students was observed, together with social service hours that were accredited; there is a statistically significant difference when compared with final grades from CUU students. The 22 Microbiology Laboratory groups with 342 students over those nine years worked more than 15,000 hours of community service on average. On the other hand, the average of the 22 groups was 93.5 with a maximum score of 100. Only 24 students from CEM obtained less than 90 in their final grade in contrast with the students from CUU where the average of final grades was 87.

In addition, all students answered a qualitative survey twice, before and after the microbiological sampling in the foundations. The survey objective was to obtain the degree of satisfaction of the students having this kind of real-life experience. In the initial diagnosis before visiting the foundation, only 20% of the students said that their career could perform in the social support area, they were unable to predict the activities that they would do in a foundation. However, after visiting the foundation 100% of the students expressed interest in supporting both people with disabilities and foundations throughout their careers, which accomplishes another humanitarian goal of achieving student empathy and solidarity with people in different social circumstances besides improving their grades.

Given that a positive impact on the attitude and performance of the students' grades was observed, it is proposed to extend these activities to other subjects within the same career to measure the development of the students, their acquisition of knowledge, and empathy with their students.

Likewise, it is recommended that experiential experiences quantitatively demonstrate the growth of students in their knowledge and can be measured through the acquisition of other personal skills such as leadership, ability to interact with their environment, oral communication, and teamwork, among others.

Keywords:

Innovation in education, experiential learning, learning by doing, microbiology laboratory, social service.