USE OF WRITTEN TESTS BEFORE/AFTER LECTURES TO IMPROVE COMPREHENSIVE READING BY USING COMPLEMENTARY SOFTWARE

Flipped classroom has been an interesting topic of teaching research in the framework of student learning. Passive students usually watch lectures without interest instead of being active. In addition, face-to-face lectures are used to solve problems and to clarify concepts that they have seen previously using multimedia tools. Nowadays, the lecturer figure is becoming a supervisor that guide students to learn and to be a self-taught person. We do believe that in their professional careers such as engineers, students will not be supported by a supervisor to clarify what they learn. Therefore, we try in this study to make students to read the content of the following lectures on their own. We evaluate what they learn at home with a test before the face-to-face lecture. The same test is used after the class to achieve two main objectives: they pay more attention because they remember the questions of the test to be answered after the lecture and they contrast their knowledge about a wrong answer after the lecturer's explanation. This method force students to read the content before the class by a comprehensive reading and also allows the lecturer to pass quickly through the theoretical aspects of the subject, thus leaving more time during the semester to practical work and exercises.

These tests can already be done in computer classrooms although this teaching technique is more interesting in theoretical classes which usually have a great number of students and they are carried out in rooms without computers. This fact increases the time needed to correct the tests. To solve this problem we have developed a code in Matlab that creates the test questions in Latex and then provides the correction of scanned tests, so that the final marks are uploaded to the online campus.