Abstract

TARANO CARTAYA, Gilberto. Educational software for self-assessment for Morphophysiology I. RCIM [online]. 2016, vol.8, n.2, pp.239-249. ISSN 1684-1859.

Morphophysiology I is one of the most difficult subject for the first year medical students because this moment means an important change in their student life that needs adaptation to the Higher Education space, which includes a different approach to the teaching-learning process. The students need individual attention to learn adequately this difficult subject, but this is not possible due to the incidence of a high student population, joint to a high level in the students:professor ratio which make very difficult to attend to them effectively. The uses of information and communication technologies (ICT) could be a solution to resolve the problem that affects the university learning contexts. The objective of this study was to design an educational software for self-assessment of Morphophysiology I. It was dessigned a web site as teaching media. It was programmed by the author in HTML language. The software contains 530 questions, distributed in 29 tests for training students in two particular ways: true or false tests and multiple-choice selection with images incorporated when needed. The web site has booklets about seminars and training classes to help students to improve the summative assessment. It also includes animated video about some difficult comprehension aspects of Histology, Biochemistry and Embryology. The software functions perfectly in smartphones, tablets, and laptops or on personal computers. The software only requires an internet browser associated to operative system. Its size is 266 MB. The software introduces students and professors to new trends in pedagogical assessment: self-evaluation, continuous and formative evaluation that improves the learning skills of the students. The software is a possible solution to help student's attention in a virtual environment, without the direct professor's attention. Pilot assay in final exam of Morphophysiology l indicated that the development of self-assessment with the software designed renders considerable improvement in students' academic achievement in comparison to the traditional assessment systems.

Keywords : educational software; morphophysiology I; self-assessment; academic performance.

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