Abstract:

Epidemiology is an essential subject in animal and public health, which is included in the first semesters of most veterinary degrees. Use of epidemiological methods requires the understanding of a diversity of mathematical concepts, what increases the difficulty of learning and predisposes negatively a proportion of the students of veterinary degrees with the course. Collaborative learning-based methods offer the advantage of discussing and getting feedback on individual and group perspective through interpersonal interactions. In addition, gaming is a recognized strategy for effective teaching-learning of knowledge and attitudes in health sciences. In this experience, a subset of 27 of the 212 students registered in the Epidemiology course in the 2021-22 course were enrolled in a teaching-learning experience based on the collaborative development of a game to learn basics concepts and methods in Epidemiology. The activity was developed in small groups of 4-5 students and consisted in the elaboration of questions about concepts and methods explained in class to develop a game. The game has been used as a tool by teachers to get a dynamic classroom for the whole group or through the virtual classroom as an individual learning method for students. The groups prepared the questions and formulated answers based on the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, where each student was assigned a role and the teacher acted as mediator, during four sessions. The game used in this experience was based on The Game of the Goose (“La Oca”), an ancient game resembling the Camino de Santiago. Nevertheless, the activity can be adapted to any other game involving Q&A. Non-enrolled students participated individually in an alternative activity, an online seminar that consisted in answering a sequence of questions about a scientific article with the feedback of teachers. Neither activity was compulsory but could account for up to 20 % of the final grade obtained in the course. Grades obtained in the final course exams by the students following the alternative method (n= 27) were compared with those following the online seminar (n= 154) and with those that did not participate in either (n=31). All students enrolled in the gaming experience completed all activities, whereas 68.8 % of the students enrolled in the online seminar completed the activity. The proportion of students that passed the subject was 77.8 % in the gaming experience group, 66.2 % in the online seminar and 38.7 % in the students that did not enrol in either. There was trend in the grades in the final exams suggesting a higher performance in students that followed the collaborative gaming (5.9 ± 0.2) compared to those that followed the online seminar (5.4 ± 0.1) or those that did not followed either (5.0 ± 0.3). The degree of satisfaction of students about the collaborative gaming experience was higher than about the online seminar (71.7% and 30.8 %, respectively). Advantages of the alternative experience mentioned by the students were that it helped them to prepare the exams and follow the subject up to date. Therefore, this experience based on collaborative learning and gaming seems to offer an effective tool to help in the process of teaching-learning Epidemiology.

Keywords:

Educational innovation, Gamification, Epidemiology.