LEARNING ASSESSMENT IN POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS: A COMPARISON BETWEEN TRADITIONAL AND NON TRADITIONAL TEACHING STRATEGIES

This work is devoted to describing and discussing the comparison and assessment concerning the learning of two different groups of postgraduate students. The study was performed at Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN-Mx).The group A followed non-traditional strategies of learning and group B was trained in a traditional way. Our results showed that there is a better performance of the group A.

We used two different tools to evaluate the acquired knowledge of a specific subject (the Casimir effect): A multiple option exam having eight questions, and a group presentation. In the former case the exam was developed in such way that all the answers were similar, this to avoid answering the exam by elimination. In the latter case the evaluation was performed by three different examiners, they graded the group presentation based on fixed criteria -containing eight different questions-(Was there an introduction to the subject?, Did the team use the black board or some other material to develop the subject?, Did the drawings or mathematical formulas were appropriate to describe the subject?, etcetera) for each question there was 1 point if the answer was positive or 0 points if the answer was negative. At the end of the presentation there was a question-answer session (two questions for each examiner). The results showed that students of group A seemed to be comfortable during the exposition explanation. The note of group B was 5.3/8. Concerning students of group B the reviewers had the impression that they seemed to be uncomfortable during the exposition. The note of group B was 5.0/8.

The most remarkable difference between groups A and B was the exam notes. The mean note of group A was 7/8, there was one student that got 8/8 correct answers, two students with 7/8 wright answers and one student that got 6/8 right answers. Concerning group B the mean note was 5.5/8. Two students got 6/8 right answers and the other two got 5/8 right answers.

These results demonstrated that students who followed constructive learning process obtained better results in comparison to students who took traditional lessons.