Improving Motivation And Continuous Assessment In Engineering Classrooms Through Student Response Systems

The use of Student Response Systems (SRS) is highly recommended to encourage the active and meaningful learning of students in each lecture. SRS promotes the motivation of students and improves the system of continuous assessment. One of the most popular applications designed for SRS is Socrative (Socrative n.d.). The use of Socrative gives real meaning to continuous assessment, since the teacher has an easily manageable record of the evolution of their students‘learning and will help the teacher to schedule both formative and summative assessment. The application allows the detection of topics that each student may not have understood and determines the percentage of the entire class with the same difficulty. Beyond the use of Socrative as an evaluation instrument, sufficiently referenced, in this article we present different methodologies supported by SRS implemented in engineering studies at the University the Salamanca. The methodologies aim to promote autonomous work outside the classroom, and in face-to-face classes, to maintain the attention and lead the reasoning of the students to facilitate learning. The influence of the methodologies proposed by the authors on a series of indicators related to the motivation and commitment of the students to the subjects will be presented. To the best of our knowledge, most of the work on SRS have been applied to non-university educational levels and for assessment purposes and very few of them have applied SRS to undergraduate engineering studies. The novelty of this work lies in introducing new methodologies supported by SRS in university engineering studies.