LEARNING PROCESS AND SUCCESS RATES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN THERMAL ENGINEERING SUBJECTS

The higher education faces to important challenges that must be solved in coming years if we want to form competitive professionals and responsible citizens for the future. According to the last Conference of Bolonia Process, the emerging digital revolution, the growing social inequalities, the economic recession and the change in cultural values are generating a new higher education’s context in which there is a lack of student background data, needed to design appropriate educational policies.

To this respect, the authors consider of great importance to identify patterns in the student behavior that help to reduce the dropout rate and to increase the success figures. In the last years, we observe a decrease in engagement and motivation of students, an increase in diversity and lower knowledge in basic subjects, such as mathematics and elementary physics, which reduce the quality of the learning process and, finally, decrease the success rates.

Encouraged by this scenario, the authors have implemented innovative experiences based in the flipped classroom model (FCM) and the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) resources to reverse these problems, in a certain extent, and increase the quality of teaching-learning process. To monitor and assess of the reception and the perception from students of these innovation activities, the authors have stored and analyzed diverse data from the students to this end.

In this paper, a comparative study is presented for the subjects of Engineering Thermodynamics and Thermal Engineering of second course in the Degree in Industrial Technologies Engineering at the University of Zaragoza (project PIIDUZ_17_299 financed by the Program for Promoting Teaching Innovation). There is a significant number of common enrolled students in both subjects, which means a better scenario to be analyzed. Through different data extracted from the Moodle educational platform and from pools answered by students, some conclusions have been drawn regarding habits and practices associated to better learning results.