Economics and business: Teaching innovation performance
Beginning the lessons with a test, continuing them with a debate in groups about the right answers, sharing the solutions of the test with the students and listening to the teacherʼs short explanations at the end. This is the weekly routine for nine classroom groups of the Faculty of Economics and Business who are following a new project on teaching innovation. This methodology, which reduces the traditional lesson to a short explanation at the end, is giving excellent results in academic performance. This has taken place in classrooms that are fully created by students who are re-taking the course and had low grades. After seeing the obtained results, the new methodology has been used in ordinary groups in several subjects of the Faculty.
Beginning the lessons with a test, continuing them with a debate in groups about the right answers, sharing the solutions of the test with the students and listening to the teacherʼs short explanations at the end. This is the weekly routine for nine classroom groups of the Faculty of Economics and Business who are following a new project on teaching innovation. This methodology, which reduces the traditional lesson to a short explanation at the end, is giving excellent results in academic performance. This has taken place in classrooms that are fully created by students who are re-taking the course and had low grades. After seeing the obtained results, the new methodology has been used in ordinary groups in several subjects of the Faculty.
“You enjoy the lessons”, say the lecturers Mònica Serrano and Glòria Rubert, who think the new method is making students pay more attention and participate more. The initiative came up with the need to find a solution to the low performance and low attendance of the focus groups of the Faculty of Economics and Business, which are mainly formed by hold-back students of “difficult” subjects, such as Microeconomics.
With this situation, they decided to innovate the way of teaching. The result can be explained in figures. With the traditional method the percentage of these student groups that passed the course was 46,9% and with the new system this number went to a 68,1%, according to the data from the academic years 2013/2014 and 2014/2015. The students reached a performance similar to that of the standard groups. The teachers stress that students in these groups have to take the same exams than the standard groups (a test that accounts for the 60% of the final grade) and the only difference is the way in which the resting 40% is assessed: in the traditional system, this percentage is based on two partial examinations, while in the new system, it is calculated through different evaluation tests that are taken each week in class.
The only aspect the students dislike is that the new system gives them more work to do, which is the same for teachers. Each week, they have to add material into the virtual campus so that students can prepare the lesson, they have to study and correct the tests every week too. But according to the lecturers, the positive aspects make up for this effort: “Students are acquiring knowledge and are developing critical skills and teamwork; in every session they have to analyse the othersʼ opinion and find common answers”. In this academic year (2017/2018), the new method is being applied in eight standard groups and one focus group (GIE).
After this experience, lecturers who took part in the initiative have constituted as Teaching Innovation Group of the UB in Active and Vivid Learning Techniques on Economics (TAAVE). In the group file, they systematized their task, which responds to three teaching innovation lines: team-based learning, flipped classroom, and frequent tests. Also, the project is framed within the idea of social responsibility of the university, which promotes an inclusive teaching to reach all students.
The innovation experience led these lecturers from Economics and Business to publish an article in the journal Innovations in Education and Teaching International, dedicated to research, innovation and best practices in higher education. Like in other teaching innovation groups of the UB, a total of one hundred, they have the support from the Program on research, innovation and improvement on teaching and learning (RIMDA) which supports and assesses teaching innovation. Also, some lecturers from TAAVE are taking part in a pilot project from RIMDA in the Bellvitge Campus. They give advice to lecturers who want to apply, in a different reality like health science teaching, the same innovation lines from Economics and Business.