Abstract
The use of new technologies in higher education has surprisingly emphasized students’ tendency to adopt a passive behavior in class. Participation and interaction of students are essential to improve academic results. This paper describes an educational experiment aimed at the promotion of students’ autonomous learning by requiring them to generate test type questions related to the contents of the course. The main idea is to make the student feel part of the evaluation process by including students’ questions in the evaluation exams. A set of applications running on our university online learning environment has been developed in order to provide both students and teachers with the necessary tools for a good interaction between them. Questions uploaded by students are visible to every enrolled student as well as to each involved teacher. In this way, we enhance critical analysis skills, by solving and finding possible mistakes in the questions sent by their fellows. The experiment was applied over 769 students from 12 different courses. Results show that the students who have actively participated in the experiment have obtained better academic performance.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful to Dr. Juan Carlos Fabero, Dr. Katzalin Olcoz, and Dr. Jose Manuel Velasco for participate actively in the project and providing us the data of the grades obtained by their students. We would like also to especially mention Decanato de la Facultad de Informatica (UCM) for helping us to carry out this study.
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Appendix
Appendix
Appendix 1: ECTS Grade Equivalence
To understand the Spanish grade system, we present Table 6. This table is only for guidance, to facilitate the understanding of the Spanish grade system.
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Sanchez-Elez, M., Pardines, I., Garcia, P. et al. Enhancing Students’ Learning Process Through Self-Generated Tests. J Sci Educ Technol 23, 15–25 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-013-9447-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-013-9447-7