Abstract:

The incorporation of novel technological applications in Higher Education such as online student response systems has shown to be particularly convenient for increasing motivation, engagement and performance of students, checking comprehension during the class and assessment purposes, among other benefits. In particular, Socrative is a smart student response system that enables instructors to realize or assess what students have learned in their lectures in real time. Using this tool, instructors can design online assessments and students can access to them using their own mobile devices. In this study, Socrative was used to enhance active learning of students of experimental sciences Degrees and Masters at the University of Valencia along two academic years (2018-2019 and 2019-2020). The study embraces different theoretical and experimental subjects related to the Analytical Chemistry area. Since this platform offers a wide range of possibilities to create tasks and questions as well as several ways of controlling the activity (teacher paced, open navigation, etc), in this work, we describe several examples (with different management options) of the Socrative application such as lecture comprehension, collaborative reading activity seminar, assessment in laboratory sessions, students' exam preparation, etc. In addition, a critical survey using an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of this tool is thoroughly discussed. Overall results reveal favourable students’ attitudes toward this technology and a positive impact of its use in teaching and learning of Analytical Chemistry foundations in higher education.

Keywords:

Socrative, Analytical Chemistry, Teaching innovation, Student motivation, Laboratory instruction, Exam preparation, Online homework, Formative feedback.