Abstract:

The MESCA Innovation Project, developed at the university of Oviedo, consisted in the generation of an open-source tool in R code for the generation of small problems that helped the students practice the skills necessary to pass the Thermal Engineering course. These self-correcting problems were uploaded to the virtual campus of the course, allowing the students to practice outside the classroom without the need of a supervising professor. After an initial successful tryout, self-perception questions were added to the tests before and after them, in order to gather information about the level of confidence that the students had in their knowledge. In this work, results from these tests and their relationship to the performance of the students in the course are presented. It was found that the participation in the online tests was correlated with a better performance at the final course scores. In addition, different student self-perception ranges were observed, from the most optimistic to the most pessimistic ones, passing by the most realistic ones. The answers to the first self-perception questions were, in general, more related to the nature of the students, whereas the answers to the second self-perception questions matched the tests results with more accuracy. The introduction of self-perception questions seems to increase awareness of students in their learning progress, allowing them to readjust their learning process if necessary. Furthermore, it is a significant variable to be considered by professors during the development of the course, as it may help detect learning difficulties and addressing them before the final exam.

Keywords:

Distance evaluation, open source tool, learning self-perception, self-assessment.