DESIGN OF A NEW IT-BASED TOOL TO SUPPORT THEORY CLASS WITH PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING IN APPLIED STATISTICS

Introduction:
The establishment of the new degrees in Higher Education has led to the necessity to adapt the teaching methods to the requirements of the curricula. Traditional teaching methods were based mainly in theory class, which used as a didactic strategy the teacher's verbal presentation of the contents of a specific subject, often only in unidirectional way (teacher-student). This traditional method, which cannot be excluded in some subjects, does not facilitate meaningful learning or skill assessment. In this context, we should look for a way to improve the learning process and motivate the students with complementary learning methods. Thus, our aim was to design a mobile IT-based interactive tool that serves as support for the theory content in the subject “Statistics” in the degree of Physiotherapy, allowing to pose problems and getting immediate feedback during the course of the classes.

Methods:
The first phase of work consisted in the selection of content that would be included in the mobile application. With this aim, the teaching staff held several meetings and defined 40 items (1-2 per lesson). A slide was designed for each item including a multiple choice question. The second phase consisted in the elaboration of the mobile application using the platform “Testmoz”, which included the aforementioned 40 items with multiple choice options to answer.

Results:
The result of our work was an application that allowed to support the theory lessons by means of presenting problems to the students and gathering instantaneous feedback on the answers, thus allowing the teacher to assess if the if the concepts have been satisfactorily assimilated. The core of the application is composed of 40 items that evaluate knowledge in the following sections: 1) Basic data analysis, 2) Descriptive statistics, 3) Introduction to inferential statistics and hypothesis contrast, 4) Study of the relationship between variables (qualitative-quantitative), 5) Parametric contrast of means (t-test, one-way ANOVA, factorial ANOVA), 6) Non-parametric tests. Furthermore, the application allows to register the time to respond and individual choices, thus allowing a continuous monitoring of the participation of the students in the class. This can allow the teacher to know, immediately, the percentage of people who answered correctly the questions and to do a follow-up of the students during the semester.

Conclusion:
Here, we describe and present an application designed for mobile devices with the aim of complementing the theory classes in the subject “Applied Statistics” in the Degree of Physiotherapy. This can enable future studies to introduce and investigate the effectiveness of our tool and make a daily monitoring of the progress of the student, evaluate the degree of satisfaction and compare the efficacy versus traditional methods used teaching the subject.