Abstract:

Higher Education is under a continuous transformation process. The advances in the field of Information and Communications Technology provide new tools that support the academic needs in different teaching and learning models. Flip teaching, blended learning, teamwork, effective oral and written communication, problem-solving strategies and peer assessment are, among others, methodologies that are being used in our daily instruction model.

In order to quantify student learning gains after the introduction of a methodological change standardized assessments in introductory physics (i.e., concept inventories) have been proposed. We considered that the concept inventory Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA) is well aligned with the topics and content depth of our courses.

For this work, we report on the results of the BEMA assessment for students of Electricity courses of Engineering Degrees taught at the Higher Technical School of Design Engineering (ETSED) Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). The BEMA pre-test and post-test assessment was delivered at the beginning and at the end of the course to students of the Degrees on Electronic Engineering and Industrial Automation and on Degree on Aerospace Engineering.

Normalized gain, defined as the difference of the number of points between the post-test and the pre-test divided by the maximum possible gain, was obtained for each student. From data, apart from the average normalized gain calculation for the group, analysis of student gain data on individual questions were performed. We are interested to find out if the screencast on specific topics, delivered to students, have some effect on their knowledge about the topic. In half of the units, students used traditional written documents: books, slide; in the other half of the units, they could watch videos prepared by the teachers. The units have been selected in such a way that both parts have similar difficulty, according to our experience. If there is some difference in the average gain of both parts it could be attributed to the effect of the use of the videos.

Keywords:

Innovation effectiveness, concept inventories, screencast, flip teaching.