Abstract:

Nowadays, information and communication technologies have an increasingly relevant role in the field of education. In this way, "Kahoot!" is one of the most used applications in classrooms to try to motivate students and gamify learning. However, its use is often indiscriminate and not all the subjects require the same skills. For this reason, the objective of this study is to analyse the relation between “Kahoot!” application utilization with students’ final marks in the subject Statistics in the Degree of Physiotherapy.

192 Students of the first course participated in this project. They belonged to the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 academic years. Throughout the semester, four tests with the application “Kahoot!” were administered, after each thematic unit (test I: Introduction to statistics; test II: Descriptive statistics; test III: Inferential statistics: mean comparisons (T-test and ANOVA); and test IV: Statistical inference and nonparametric tests). The total score of volunteers was correlated with the final mark by Pearson correlation test, and unpaired Student’s T-test was used to explore significant differences between approved and unapproved students who completed all the tests (n=110) and to compare the final mark between the volunteers who completed all the tests and those who did not complete all of them (n=82).

Results only showed significant correlations (p<0.05) between the final mark and the second “Kahoot!” test, but with low correlation coefficient (r=0.292). In the same way, students who passed the exam obtained significant higher score (mean = 2969.50 (SD = 1651.08)) than students who do not (2161.86 (1277.13), p<0.05) for the test of unit II. In addition, results showed significantly higher final mark for the students that completed all tests (6.91 (1.44)) than students who did not (5.74 (2.15), p<0.05).

In conclusion:
1) we did find a low, albeit significant, correlation between the final mark and the score in Kahoot!,
2) significant differences were obtained between approved and unapproved students only in test II, and
3) the students who completed all the test had a higher final mark than those who did not.

Thus, the use of Kahoot! seems to improve academic results in the subject “Statistics” in first year degree students of physiotherapy. In addition, more studies are needed to verify whether other learning methods can be more effective in motivating students and improving academic results in this subject.

Keywords:

Innovation, technology, research projects, Kahoot!, gamify, Physiotherapy degree, statistics.