DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A PLURI-DISCIPLINARY SELF-EVALUATION STRATEGY

Background and introduction:
Continuous evaluation of the competences of the students in a certain matter is nowadays essential in the frame of the new teaching strategies in the European Educational Area for the assessment of Students Learning. In this way, OBJECTIVE TESTS conducted through multiple-choice questionnaires constitute a useful tool to implement a continuous evaluation formative strategy, especially in those situations in which the big number of students makes unviable a personalized evaluation with a direct contact between the teacher and the student. Our previous experiences using Kahoot! as a game-based response system demonstrated its utility for the implementation of a tool for the continuous evaluation based on the use of multiple-choice tests in the classroom using the student’s own mobile devices.

Objective:
The motivation of the students to take part in this type of evaluation strategies is often one of the limiting factors to ensure the success of their implementation. In this sense, the primary objective of our study was to make the students themselves the protagonists in the design of the tests with the help of previously trained mentor students. Subsequently, the teacher's role consisted in the design of a test with the proposed items and to analize their reliability to compare it with other tests previously designed by the teacher. All the tests were conducted in this English.

Material and methods:
The continuous evaluation strategy was proposed to students from different subjects and studies within the field of Health Sciences: Degree on Pharmacy and Degree on Food Technology.
The study was conducted following different steps: 1. Training of two mentor students, both form the Degree of Pharmacy (5th year). 2. Proposal to the students from different subjects to design multiple-choice questions, specifying the correct answer and justifying it, following the instructions of the mentors. 3. Compilation of all the received questions to create a test by the teacher, selecting the most appropriate items, using the on-line educational platform Kahoot. 4. Launching of the tests for every subject in the classrooms and collecting the results for evaluation of the reliability.

Results:
The proposed methodology was tested in different subjects and the reliability data were compared with those previously obtained with tests designed by teachers. In contrast to previous studies performed in the last few years, no problems were found with the launch of the test with the mobile devices of the students. The biserial punctual correlation using the Cronbach’s alpha, showed better reliability of the test performed by teachers but the differences were not as big as previously expected and the degree of implication of the students for their own continuous evaluation was better. It was also observed that the students showed no problem to deal with technical information in English but the situation was quite the contrary when it was proposed that part of the evaluation tests could be in English.

In the light of these findings, we are able to conclude that the strategy here proposed constitutes a promising to tool to perform a continuous evaluation, especially useful for those groups with big number of students.