Abstract:

Introduction and objectives:
An important controversy in the field of education is how much instructional guidance student require when facing a new task. Some studies highlight the importance of self-discovering and defend the advantages of using little guidance, while others argue that inexperienced students require middle to high guidance. The present study explored the effects of the inclusion of an innovative teaching methodology, the online practical activities (OPs), in the subject Psychological Assessment I, in the Degree in Psychology. The OPs are activities with a clear structure in which the students are guided step-by-step in their learning process and receive immediate feedback when completing a complex task. The present study explored the degree to which the utilization of the OPs contributed to predict the academic achievement of the students.

Methods.
The sample was composed of 74 undergraduate students in psychology who were enrolled in the course Psychological Assessment at a University in Madrid (Spain). The OPs were volunteer activities which students could access at any time during the course. We assessed students’ frequency of utilization of the OPs, their satisfaction with this new resource, and their marks in all the activities of the course (i.e. different assignments that they had to complete, a reflection about each of the assignments, a final group task in which they had to apply their knowledge to a case and the final test). This study explored how the performance of the students in the different course activities, along with the number of OPs that they completed contributed to predict the degree of learning achieved by the student, assessed by their final mark at the exam. To do so, descriptive, correlational and regression analyses were carried out.

Results:
Results showed that 51.5% of the students used the OPs. Their satisfaction with this resource was high. The number of OPs completed did not contribute to predict the level of learning acquired by the students. However, the performance of the students in the methodologies used, all taken together is significantly correlated with the marks achieved in the exam. The activity that contributed to this prediction more significantly was the student’s reflection about the assignments that they had to complete during the course.

Conclusion:
The high satisfaction with this methodology contrast with the fact that only about 50% of the students enrolled in the course used this new resource, though it had been developed to support them in their learning process. However, it is possible that the final mark at the exam (which we used as an indicator of the students' degree of learning) does not accurately reflect how much participants have learned. Future studies should continue exploring the effect of online resources that guide the students through the resolution of complex tasks given that these type of resources has several advantages such as their high accessibility and their possibility to provide immediate feedback to the students, modeling their behavior.

Acknowledgement:
This work has been supported by University of Zaragoza: PIIDUZ_19_052, PIIDUZ_19_048 and PIIDUZ_19_177

Keywords:

Educational innovation, educational technology, psychology education.