Enseñanza tradicional vs enseñanza para el aprendizaje activo. Utilización de tutoriales para física introductoria en un curso de mecánica para ingeniería

Abstract

National and international studies show systematically the low performance of primary andsecondary students of Latin American countries concerning the practical knowledge of science andmathematics. Even though just a small fraction of those prospective students are able to access touniversity studies, only about 10-15%, finished those studies, obtaining an university diploma. Tocontribute to the study of this important and difficult problem of our universities, in thiscontribution we report on the application of the active learning teaching “Tutorials for IntroductoryPhysics”. A group comparison methodology was used to compare the conceptual learning of forceand motion obtained by this methodology and that obtained with the traditional instruction carriedout up to now. This conceptual knowledge was measured using the multiple choice test, given tothe students before (pre) and after (post) the instruction was implemented. The course whereTutorials was applied obtained satisfactory results with an intrinsic gain (g=0.56) that double thatobtained by the students in the control group (g=0.27). A linear correlation analysis show that thefinal performance depends on the group variable (methodology) with an important size effect of0.536 (p<0.001) while the incidence of the previous knowledge (pre test) was modest, with a sizeeffect of 0.319, (p=0.001).