MIND MAPS AND COOPERATIVE WORK IN PHYSIOLOGY SUBJECT

In recent years one of the learning strategies considered to ensure that students develop competencies focused on group participation has been to encourage cooperative work. These types of interactions are aimed at improving learning by creations of teams that work at a higher standard of performance, generating positive competition among their members with the intention being that the group members reach the desired level of learning. Using this method, the work undertaken in cooperation is scored, but individual achievements are also taken into account. The general objective of this task has been to implement a teaching activity that fosters autonomous learning in the classroom through the collaborative work of students, in a playful way, and which also promotes their active participation by increasing their motivation. Teamwork is stimulated by schematizing and subsequently broadening the topic of the subject taught by producing a poster that the team is required to present. The innovation consists of dividing the class into two groups, A and B, and then subdividing each group into three teams 1, 2 and 3. Each team is assigned a part of the topic explained in class and a leader is chosen from among the students with whom six classmates will collaborate. A signal sounds every 10 minutes and the six participants must change to the next team in the group. The task should be completed in 30 minutes and once finished the results of groups A and B should be compared and the best Poster was chosen. Subsequently, the knowledge acquired in the activity is evaluated with a test on Kahoot and a partial examination, as well as a satisfaction survey of the activity. Those participating in this teaching innovation are first-year Dentistry students in the international plan. The proposed activity was done in the classroom at the end of a unit using six large cards (A1), thick colored markers and a stopwatch. Students had to synthesize and capture the main ideas taking into account the time they had to complete the task. Once ten minutes had elapsed, they had to move to the next topic until they had finished the three topics assigned in 30 minutes. The correlation between the scores of the activity developed and the examination taken, and the improvement of the marks obtained with respect to the group of the previous year when the methodology had not developed demonstrates that this teaching technique increases motivation for the subject. This has meant an improvement in academic performance, increasing the number of students who have passed, which also demonstrates an enhancement in various cognitive skills, such as the ability to synthesize, memorize and correlate concepts. In summary, we consider that this new methodology, which has been widely accepted among students, is very useful in teaching our subject, so we should consider implementing it in future courses.