Abstract:

Within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) the methodologies to apply in the University teaching environment have changed. Professors must find new strategies to help students reach the goals of the Bologna Declaration, the most important being autonomous learning. Within this context we hypothesized that global learning strategies and flipped learning methodologies could lead to improvements in motivation and academic performance.

We implemented a method using both the flipped learning methodology and a global learning strategy in classes taught to toxicology students. In this sense, students had to prepare their own topics and give a presentation in front of their peers. These topics had a multidisciplinary approach, and thus, had to include information taken from other subjects they had studied that were related to the topic in toxicology. Also, classes taught by Professors included this multidisciplinary strategy, as questions were asked that required the students to find information outside the field of toxicology. Following the end of the presentations, the students answered a survey on their motivation and their feelings about how much they had learnt.

We found from the surveys conducted that students were more motivated in our classes and that they felt they were given tools necessaries for their future and that they were now better prepared. Also, we compared the mean grades of last year students with those of this year, and we found that grades had significantly improved. Further experiences must be conducted to corroborate our findings.

Keywords:

Flipped learning, EHEA, Toxicology, global learning.