Abstract:

In this work, student self-learning was facilitated during practicals by either using audiovisual teaching material or peer learning.

The main goals were:
1) to evaluate the degree to which students acquired concepts regarding animal physiology based on the completion of a crossword puzzles (C1 and C2) before and after the course,
2) to evaluate learning based on a practical explained in the classroom, compared to explanation from classmates (peer learning) or from a video.

The outcomes measured were grades on self-evaluation exercises, in class exercises and exams. In addition, at the end of the course, a questionnaire was also given to find out about student opinions. Based on the crosswords, the results for students that opted for continual evaluation (practicals and midterms) improved during the course (grade of 5.03 vs 6.4 and 3.7 vs 5.4 for C1 and C2 respectively). Students not in the continual evaluation (only final exam) also had higher grades on C2 but with lower grades overall (4.5 vs 5.5 and 3.5 vs 4.4 in C1 and C2 respectively). However, C2 was included as part of the final exam for the latter and the average grade was 8. The results from the self-evaluations or the three types of practicals were all high (average 7.1) and not significantly different among the groups. Nonetheless, the average grade obtained in the same question in both exams was higher in the self-evaluation test (8.6) than in the final exam (4.8). Regarding learning with on-line practicals, there were similar results for one question (5.6 questionnaire and 4.2 exam) but similar for another question (7.2 questionnaire and 7.8 exam). Regarding the opinion of the students, the evaluation of the course on a scale of 0-5 was similar and they considered that it was easy to answer the questions on the self-evaluation test on the classroom practical (3.8) and when explained by colleagues (3,2). However, the students valued higher the degree of learning in the classroom practicals (4,3) compared to online (3,7).

Keywords:

Evaluation, practicals lessons, on-line, peer, learning.