Abstract:

Due to the adaptation process to the European Higher Education, Spanish universities have coordinated their degrees and a deep reorganization has been done to meet European curricula requirements. However, this reorganization has forgotten the existing formative gap between secondary education and university degrees course curricula, which is particularly important in experimental subjects such as Biology. This formative gap is usually uneven among first year university students and its extent needs to be first addressed before programming the formative activities. The implementation of new technologies may help to achieve this goal by the development of attractive activities for the students. We propose to carry out several activities based on the Kahoot application to interrogate the student knowledge on experimental aspects of the Biology course within the “Degree in Medicine”.

Cells are the most elemental physiological units of all living organism, and the assimilation of several key concepts of cell biology is the objective of the Biology course. This is an eminently fundamental subject in the “Degree in Medicine”. This subject has several specific competences related to the understanding of all aspects of cell physiology and development and laboratory experimentation. To this respect, the subject Biology includes an intense practical course to fulfil the transversal competences of understanding laboratory protocols, training in different laboratory techniques and collecting and analyzing experimental results. This objective is partially hampered by the initial student knowledge; therefore, in order to test the student knowledge in experimental aspects of cell biology, several tests based on Kahoot application will be developed. The results will provide valuable information on how to modify activities and/or reinforce different parts of the practical course in order to meet the students’ needs and fill the knowledge gap, with the final objective to fulfill the competences of the Biology practical course.

Keywords:

New technologies, scientific laboratory, teamwork, transversality.