Abstract:

The methodologies employed in the teaching-learning process along Spanish universities include an increasing amount of IT tools. One of them, the so-called Clickers, are an interactive tool which can be used to obtain instantaneous feedback from the students during the lessons. This pedagogic tool, also referred to as the electronic voting system (EVS), has been thoroughly exploited in the subject “Design of experiments and Taguchi methods”, part of an official master-level degree in the University of Valencia.

A considerable part of the aforementioned subject focuses on statistics. Clickers were employed to estimate the quantitative knowledge of the students, expected to have different skills and knowledge depending of their educational backgrounds (Science, Law, Engineering, Social Sciences, …). This was done to get the students involved by showing them the utility and application of statistics to their main fields of knowledge.

Different surveys were carried out to detect potential lacks of knowledge. Next surveys focused on strengthening their knowledge on these matters.

Results, in average, were really good: a high percentage of right guesses was obtained for the questions surveyed, a high rate of students attended the lessons, and they obtained high average scores.

Furthermore, despite of a continuous increase in the rate of right guesses, inferential techniques show that there are no significant differences with respect to the average rate of right guesses. However, given that the normality hypothesis can be assumed, it is possible to obtain the minimum and maximum right guesses rate for 99.73% of the students. This shows a considerable decrease in variability, meaning that the rate of right guesses is similar and uniform among the students.

Keywords:

Graduate studies, design of experiments, academic performance, clickers, survey.