Improving the use of collaborative activities by students pairs using mathematics educational technology

Abstract

There are currently a myriad of tools that are used as a complement to educational technology to assist and encourage learning. In Mexico in mathematics area, the schools have not had a sufficient performance, so the interest of this research, is to give a tool to the students of basic level of secondary, to improve in this area. This article describes the results of two exploratory studies carried out during a school year 2016/2017 among students of the mathematics course of the Federal Secondary School No. 2 “Julio Zarate” from the city of Xalapa de Enríquez, Veracruz, Mexico. The studies aim was to find out which pairs of students in a collaborative activity obtained higher learning gains by using an intelligent tutoring system. The methodology consisted in working on students to the first and second year of secondary school, to which they were applied a battery of instruments like pre and post-test to measure the initial and final knowledge, the collaboration test and learning styles test, used as instruments of data collection. Getting results that show that students with the same learning style who work in pairs get significantly higher learning gains (higher score in their pre-test to post-test) than those who work different learning styles, it is concluded that to form teams in pairs for a collaborative activity, students must coincide with the same learning style.