José A. Álvarez-Bermejo, Luis J. Belmonte-Ureña, África Martos-Martínez, Ana B. Barragán-Martín, María M. Simón-Márquez
Abstract
As first year students come from diverse backgrounds, basic skills should be accessible to everyone as soon as possible. Transferring such skills to these students is challenging, especially in highly technical courses. Ensuring that essential knowledge is acquired quickly promotes the student's self-esteem and may positively influence failure rates. Metaphors can help do this. Metaphors are used to understand the unknown. This paper shows how we made a turn in student learning at the University of Almeria. Our hypothesis assumed that metaphors accelerate the acquisition of basic knowledge so that other skills built on that foundation are easily learned. With these goals in mind, we changed the way we teach by using metaphors and abstract concepts in a computer organization course, a technical course in the first year of an information technology engineering degree. Cluster analysis of the data on collective student performance after this methodological change clearly identified two distinct groups. These two groups perfectly matched the "before and after" scenarios of the use of metaphors. The study was conducted during 11 academic years (2002/2003 to 2012/2013). The 475 observations made during this period illustrate the usefulness of this change in teaching and learning, shifting from a propositional teaching/learning model to a more dynamic model based on metaphors and abstractions. Data covering the whole period showed favorable evolution of student achievement and reduced failure rates, not only in this course, but also in many of the following more advanced courses. The paper is structured in five sections. The first gives an introduction, the second describes the methodology. The third section describes the sample and the study carried out. The fourth section presents the results and, finally, the fifth section discusses the main conclusions.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 13. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 January 2017.
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#2,827,790
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#5,618
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#44,769
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Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#91
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Altmetric has tracked 25,863,888 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 89th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 34,844 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 13.5. This one has done well, scoring higher than 83% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 416 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its contemporaries.
