TEAM-BASED LEARNING STRATEGY TO IMPROVE MASS SPECTRAL INTERPRETATION ON POST-GRADUATE STUDENTS

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA), grounded on the Bologna process, tries to promote the quality as well as the international competitiveness of the higher education in Europe. The learning teaching process is centered on the student whereas the professor may assume a coach roll to guide the learning process. In this way, the EHEA has caused significant changes on the teaching methodologies to help the students in the acquisition of their knowledge skills. Among them, the flipped classroom has become a unique methodology strategy to improve learner retention and transfer, making an efficient use of the class time [1]. In addition, it implies an active and collaborative learning of the students [2], and at the same time it allows to potentiate the student-professor feedback and self-paced learning [3], becoming a great option for high education studies. In this work, a flipped classroom team-based learning strategy was proposed to improve mass spectral interpretation knowledge on chemistry post-graduate students. In the first session, after a brief lecture where the most relevant tools to interpret mass spectral information were explained, workgroups of 5-6 students were built to commonly resolve some practical exercises. Afterwards, autonomous work was incentivized by providing them supplementary material to go deeper into the learning process. Thus, in the second session, the students asked those concepts which were not clearly understood, and the lecture was focused on highlight these points. Again, mass spectral interpretation exercises were raised to student workgroups, but in this case, the results achieved by the workgroups were discussed with the professor along the session. The success of the strategy was evaluated by means of an individual exercise. The academic results in the final test of two groups of students (control group: 2016-2017, and team based learning group: 2018-2019) were compared through the same mass spectral elucidation exercise. Results showed in all cases, that the use of the team-based learning strategy has led a significant increase in overall grades and the number of students who got an excellent in the exercise. Finally, it should be noted that the beneficiaries of the team-based learning strategy have been both students, since they have improved their academic performance, and professors, because the motivation and participation of students increased. At the same time, professors have an early feedback about the students learning process, which has a positive impact on the academic performance and allows them to regulate the current teaching-learning process.