Evaluating through forums

an experience with engineering students

Abstract

This paper describes an experience developed with engineering students about the use of forums in order to evaluate learning in the subject Probability and Statistics at the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (Regional Avellaneda). The design was implemented during the first quarter of 2020, in a virtual classroom of the Moodle platform, in an emergency remote teaching context due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We worked with forums that may be resources for formative evaluation and let generate spaces that are able to verify metacognition of knowledge of each student. In that way, an activity was developed based on Sensitivity and Specificity of a test, which are concepts that are funded on Conditional Probability applied to a real situation context. The assignment included the reading of a newspaper article in which mathematicians Alicia Dickenstein and Pablo Groisman developed the topic related to COVID-19 context. The study was carried out with 323 students who were randomly distributed in eight groups. Regarding the results, 81.11% of them were able to complete the activity, meanwhile, the 2.16% only partially completed it. In addition, 97% of students achieved the proposed objectives. Evaluating the experience, we consider that the forum tool provided by Moodle can be an adequate resource to propose collaborative activities to evaluate specific contents of the subject and also other competencies that students should develop for their professional future, such as effective communication and peer-to-peer work.