Abstract:

Introduction and objective:
Very frequently, university students experience high levels of academic anxiety and low levels of perceived self-efficacy, which interfere with their academic performance. Taking exams and speaking in public are the situations in which students tend to feel more anxious during their academic studies. Writing and presenting a Final Master's Project (TFM) is a compulsory subject for all master's students that involves both difficult situations. Consequently, master's students often face the writing and oral examination of their TFM with high levels of anxiety, low levels of self-efficacy and without the necessary competencies for its correct execution. The aim of our study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a teaching innovation project in reducing anxiety and increasing students' self-efficacy in order to achieve a better performance of the students in the writing and oral defense of their TFM in their Master's degree in secondary school teaching.

Methods:
Five theoretical-practical seminars were designed to cover the key competencies to be acquired by the students. These competencies relate to the writing of academic-scientific texts and the acquisition of communication skills. Through a pre-post experimental procedure, we have evaluated students’ self-efficacy and their level of anxiety towards their TFM. In addition, students’ performance has been examined through a simulation of TFM and its subsequent oral defense. The project has been supported by the Moodle and the EDpuzzle platforms, and the materials were available to the students.

Results:
Our results showed that after the intervention students reported higher levels of efficacy in writing the TFM, and lower levels of anxiety when dealing with the TFM. They also showed higher levels of self-efficacy for the oral defense of the TFM and lower levels of anxiety when thinking about dealing with the oral defense of the TFM. The performance in the simulation of TFM was better after participating in the program than before. After the intervention, students understand how to write a TFM and defend their TFM in the correct way, following APA guidelines, and without plagiarism. Significantly better scores were obtained in their TFM when compared with the students of the previous course which did not take part in this project.

Conclusions:
Our study has shown that participants are more effective in the writing and oral examination of their TFM at the end of the program, show lower levels of anxiety and higher performance in completing the task. This study implies a step forward in taking care of students’ mental health and wellbeing, which will potentially result in improved academic achievement. Future studies will be aimed at extending the program to final degree projects (TFG).

Acknowledgement:
This work has been supported by University of Zaragoza: PIIDUZ_19_052, PIIDUZ_19_048 and PIIDUZ_19_177

Keywords:

University, Master students, APA, Plagiarism, Edpuzzle.