Abstract:

Providing feedback and remedial instruction to students during their learning process is a key aspect of their successful building of knowledge, since it allows diagnosing individual learning difficulties, as well as identifying strong and weak group dynamics. As a specific form of feedback, immediate feedback allows students to know whether their approach to a certain question or task is correct while they are carrying it out, allowing them to correct or modify it accordingly. Direct feedback has been shown to enhance student performance by preventing the proceduralization of errors. To maximize its effectiveness, it is recommended that immediate feedback be paired with instruction, providing new opportunities to apply and reinforce the knowledge gained from it.

In this work, we present the design and implementation of an App for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) that facilitates the formulation of questions and the collection of the answers provided by students in real time, enabling their direct representation in the classroom. The aim has been to complement and improve the teaching of a course on fundamental Physics taught in the first year of engineering degrees at our institution. Nevertheless, it has been implemented as a transversal resource, applicable to any course of any university degree, with a prior adaptation of the questions.

To develop the App, we have used the free version of the software Thunkable. The App allows navigation through individual question pages, grouped by the topics taught in the Physics course, giving the option to select the correct answer in a multiple-choice format. Once the students provide and send their answers, the App collects and stores them in a spreadsheet developed with the software Google Sheets, creating a new row for every answer provided by the users, with identification of the corresponding question for further processing.

Real-time presentation of the student responses has been implemented as an educational resource for immediate feedback. This is achieved by a Microsoft Excel file that is linked to the Google Sheet, which allows the embedding of the resulting graphs in Microsoft PowerPoint. The Microsoft Excel file and its corresponding graphs can be updated periodically or at the instructor’s request. Finally, an .apk installer of the developed App has been generated, which can be distributed among the educational community via Moodle or direct download.

With this app, we expect to include elements of interactivity and real-time feedback in university teaching. Specifically, it has been designed to present fundamental questions on the topics covered in a Physics course in Engineering degrees, to know the students' answers in real time, quickly and non-disruptively during the class. It has been designed so that this knowledge is aggregated, preserving the anonymity of the students, to encourage them to respond to the posed question. Nevertheless, the App can be easily adapted to cover the content of any subject, thus allowing the inclusion of micro-diagnostic evaluation activities during in-person sessions.

Keywords:

Immediate feedback, survey App, higher education.