Resumen de Interactive Tools for First-Semester Undergraduate Chemistry Course in Uruguay: Student Choices and Impact on Student Performance and Dropout
Dropout and low academic performance at university level constitute a big current challenge. In this work, materials comprising different interactive tools were developed following instructional design, rooted in the cognitive load theory. They were applied in a first-year lecture chemistry course to tackle low academic performance and high dropout rates in the context of a free of charge and unrestricted admission public university, Universidad de la República, Uruguay. A general survey was carried out to gather information on the use frequency and usefulness perception of the offered tools, and the data were analyzed using the Spearman’s correlation coefficients along with multiple linear and logistic regression models. The results show that students employed the interactive materials with no general gender bias. However, female students especially favored resources such as solving clues, while male students were more prone to access the tools going beyond the course objectives, that is, those related to higher-level reading and historic anecdotes. Repeater students positively acknowledge the usefulness of sections connecting the tasks to applications and real-life curiosities, probably because they bring up new and interesting content. Our findings indicate that the frequent use of the interactive materials promotes a 58% decrease in the students’ odds of dropping out, resulting also in a 0.5% average increase in the student final academic performance in 2017. The implementation of interactive tools in an especially open program and the disaggregation of the obtained results by previous knowledge, gender, and course repetition make this work complementary to previous findings on the matter.
