Abstract:

University curricula have traditionally been characterized by a pronounced interdisciplinary disconnect where the individuality of the teaching work prevails. The emergence of a new teaching framework directed towards the European Higher Education Area has meant a reformulation of teaching methodologies based on learning and not only on teaching. In this context, the inter-disciplinary work, based on the coordination of the teaching staff, has a very important role to play. There are more and more educational experiences of teaching coordination horizontally and vertically, to develop interdisciplinary projects with very interesting results on their involvement in the educational process. In this context, and with the aim of encouraging and helping students to achieve a global vision of knowledge through the relationship of some disciplines with others, avoiding the traditional fragmentation of knowledge, in the current academic year 2019-2020 a coordination project between 2 basic and complementary subjects, Human Anatomy (HA) and Human Physiology (HF), was proposed for the first time. In this study, we wanted to analyse the effect that horizontal coordination activities have in the subject of Human Anatomy.

To do so we wanted to determine:
1) the rate of students who pass the subject of Human Anatomy;
2) if there are differences in the correct response rate by topic taught;
3) the global degree of complexity of the questions and topics and
4) the influence of the degree of difficulty of the questions on the success rate.

In our work, we have 200 students enrolled in the AH and FH subjects within the first term of the 1st year of the Nursing degree at the University of Alicante. The activities of coordination undertaken by the professors responsible for the subjects included a review of the timetables, order and theoretical/practical contents of the subjects as well as the kind, number and dates of the theoretical/practical assessment tests. Following the course content and the assessment tests, the academic results were analysed by analysing them in contrast with those of the previous academic year. More than 70% of the students successfully completed the HA subject in the official convocation, with 71% passing compared to 79% in the 2018-2019 academic year. This data is in accordance with the degree of difficulty of the questions, where a greater value indicates easier questions. The index analysis shows a 0.52 in 2018-2019 compared to 0.48 in the present academic year. When we study the success rate by topic, we find a higher percentage of correct answers in 13 of the 20 topics that make up the theoretical curriculum of the HA subject, representing 65% compared to 35% in 2018-2019. When studying these topics, the degree of difficulty of the questions, we found a rate of 0.47 compared to 0.35 in 2018-2019, agreeing with the higher percentage of topics with correct answers in 2019-2020. Of those 13 topics, 9 of them experienced changes in the sequence of teaching in order to achieve coordination with the Human Physiology curriculum. When studying the possible correlation between the success rate and the degree of difficulty of the questions, we found a positive correlation of 0.949, revealing a direct relationship between both variables. These results reflect an improvement in student academic output after the coordination, and while they are positive, they indicate weaknesses in our teaching to be improved.

Keywords:

Coordination, university degree, academic performance, health sciences.