Aplicación de un diseño curricular modular para la enseñanza del cálculo diferencial

Abstract

This research is the result of a series of projects that have been developed at Universidad del Bío-Bío, Chile, all aimed at improving the academic performance of students. One of such projects, in which this research is situated, began in 2010, with a pilot plan for the Career of Civil Engineering. The central idea of this project was to design in a modular way courses in three work modules. Module contain part of the original course curriculum. This required structuring the course in three modules in order to completely cover the contents of the Calculus course. Good academic results, achieved by students who completed the Modular Course of Differential Calculus, not only in this career, but also served as the basis for this research study in the context of Natural Sciences Pedagogy, redesigning and evaluating such a modular proposal of two modules for implementation. For the purpose, two randomly selected groups, Experimental and Control. The Experimental group received the Modular proposal, whereas the Control group did not. The application of this methodological work resource for the Experimental group, together with other initiatives discussed in this article, allowed for a better final academic performance than that of students on the Control group. This result is confirmed by means of statistical analys (English) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]