Abstract:

Videos have often been used in instruction as an established teaching strategy. In this teaching innovation project, video-watching took place in a flipped learning environment in order to introduce a new topic to the students. This topic was aimed to improve their academic writing. Academic writing is a difficult task for under-graduate students due to the fact that they lack the necessary competencies (APA style, plagiarism, finding quality sources…) to write a scientific text. We present a teaching innovation project in which we used Ed Puzzle, a Web-based tool for teachers, to increase self-efficacy, decrease anxiety and improve pre-graduate students´ performance in academic writing. Ed-puzzle prevents non-linear viewing, so the student cannot skip or fast-forwarding through the video. This tool provides the professor with data about students’ video-watching behaviours such as how many correct answers they did, or if they rewatched the videos. 99 pre-graduate students enrolled in the degree of primary education participated in this project (control group, without intervention, n=37; experimental group n=62). The tests measuring students’ self-efficacy and level of anxiety were conducted before (pre-test T0) and after the teaching innovation project (post-test T1). Writing performance was assessed by a performance written simulation (with a similar structure to a final End-of-Degree Project, TFG, but shorter) before and after the teaching innovation project development. The videos were recorded using power point and review questions were inserted in them via Ed-puzzle platform. After watching the videos students’ were offered a two hours long lesson in which different activities related to academic writing were performed and their doubts were solved. Our results show an improvement in the performance of the written simulation TFG from T0 to T1 in both groups. The improvement in the control group is probably due to Professor´s feedback, but is lower than in the experimental group. However, only the experimental group reported significantly higher levels of efficacy and lower levels of anxiety in writing the TFG. No differences were found in the control group.

Acknowledgement:
This work has been supported by University of Zaragoza: PIIDUZ_18_123,PIIDUZ_19_177 and PIIDUZ_19_052

Keywords:

Ed puzzle, academic writing, APA style, plagiarism, flipped environment.