Abstract:

The growing offer of postgraduate degrees in Spanish universities has been accompanied, in the same way as in other educational levels, by an increase in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The use of ICTs is motivated by the need of immediate feedback on the part of teachers regarding the results of the teaching-learning process, as well as by the similarity of these tools with others which students usually handle on a day to day basis.

In response to this situation, the involved teaching staff implemented the use of Clickers, an Audience Response System (ARS), in several lessons of a quantitative subject belonging to the curriculum of an official master's degree offered by the University of Valencia. This was done with the aim of detecting the parts of the agenda that might have not been properly taught/assimilated, in order to take appropriate measures to solve the deficiencies detected in due time.

In this work an analysis is carried out to know the students' perception with regards to the impact that the use of the ARS had on their learning process. In order to evaluate if such perception may be biased by how useful they judge the subject’s contents to be for their professional future, their opinion on this subject is also registered. Google Forms was resorted to in order to gather the students’ answers to both questions, for two consecutive promotions. This way, it is possible to assess whether their overall perception remains the same from one promotion to the next one.

A first exploratory study of the data allowed us to conclude that they valued positively the impact of clickers on their learning process, with a slight increase over time (the ratings were 8.4 out of ten and 9 out of ten for the first and second promotion, respectively). Furthermore, students regarded highly the perceived usefulness of the contents of subject in their professional future (with a rating close to 9 out of 10, on average), with an even more positive response from the latest promotion. On the other hand, although a positive relationship was found between the two scores, such was not found to be strong enough to suspect that their opinion of the ARS could have been biased by their perception of the subject itself.

Keywords:

Audience Response System (ARS), Clickers, Google Forms, exploratory analysis, assessment