Abstract:

To develop reading comprehension competence and the technical writing competence are relevant learning objectives for engineering students in the 21st century. The Electronics Engineering and Electrical Engineering programs of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia to address these learning objectives designed and implemented a learning environment based on ICT's and on the flipped classroom approach. The aims of this paper are to describe the design and implementation of the aforementioned learning environment and to analyze the learning outcomes obtained by the students who participated in said environment. Specifically, the designed environment sought that the students could promote their reading comprehension and their skills to write summaries from engineering technical texts. The learning environment consisted of two scenarios: a virtual scenario and a face-to-face scenario. The virtual scenario was implemented with base on virtual learning objects (OVA). In this scenario, students are presented with the importance of having a good reading comprehension, methods to process a text deeply and methods to elaborate summaries from engineering technical texts. Additionally, the students are asked to complete four activities: a survey to know their reading comprehension methods before completing this course, a reading comprehension test, four conceptual maps and four summaries based on engineering technical texts. The face-to-face scenario consisted of three meetings between students and teachers in the classroom. In these meetings: teachers presented to the students the justification and objectives of the learning environment, students and teachers discussed on the methods presented in the OVA's and teachers gave feedback to students about the quality of the conceptual maps and the summaries made by them. The monitoring of the students' progress about their reading comprehension competence and their writing competence was carried out by means of a rubric of evaluation. The evaluation data were analyzed by means of Repeated Measures ANOVAs. The results indicated the students improved significantly, in a statistical sense, the sentences construction, the text punctuation and elaboration of the reference lists from summarized technical texts.

Keywords:

Reading comprehension competence, writing competence, engineering education, flipped classroom aproach.