Abstract:

During the academic year 2015/2016 we have introduced in one of our subjects, “Statistics for Business II”, in the Degree of Business Administration, the software R to undertake data analysis. As part of this process, a group of teachers have worked in a project to create materials to facilitate the introduction of the new software to our students. These materials have been mainly html pages where students can learn how to carry out different types of data analysis using this software. As an additional support we have used the web-based tests available in Sakai, the Learning Management System (LMS) at the University of Murcia, to create tests that satisfy a twofold objective when used with our practical assignments. On the one hand, the questions included in the tests are designed to structure the process of doing practical assignments, what is particularly interesting not only because our students usually find the subject difficult to understand and need extra help, but also owing to R has a steep learning curve at the beginning. On the other hand, these tests help us to have an assessment of the practical assignments, as we can have a numerical mark from each test. In the two groups that participated in the experience we followed different strategies with the tests. The time available to do the test was the same, but in one of the groups students were allowed to take each test only once, whereas in the second group students could take each test as many times as they considered necessary. In this paper we describe the behavior of students in these tests for both groups and compare their results.

Keywords:

Evaluation, Self-learning, Web-based tests, R, Learning Management Systems, Statistics.