The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted higher university lecturers to develop their digital skills in order to adapt to online teaching. A group of university teachers decided to evaluate the educational uses of Mentimeter to promote student participation and active learning. A questionnaire was answered by 400 students and 12 participating academics. These 12 academic respondents also participated in a focus group after experiencing this software during an academic course. Qualitative and quantitative data was collected and analyzed to conclude that this software not only facilitated student participation during the pandemic (both face-to-face and online) in synchronous and asynchronous ways but also improved attention, engagement, collaborative learning and interaction. Immediate feedback made it possible for teachers to monitor the students’ learning processes and to adjust the content and pace accordingly. Students and educators highlighted the inclusive potential of this tool, as it allows participation from a diverse audience with different backgrounds and capacities, ensuring inclusive and equitable education for all. Some opportunities for improvement were also identified, namely more functions to make the software more attractive and adapt it to different educational objectives.
The reading achievement of children and adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has scarcely been explored in research conducted in the Spanish language and when it has, the results have been contradictory. The focus of the present research is to analyze participants' reading competency and metacognitive strategies as they carry out reading comprehension tasks. The sample was comprised of 187 Argentine schoolchildren aged 9 to 13 years old. 94 constituted the control group and the clinical group consisted of 93 schoolchildren diagnosed with ADHD. The metacognitive assessment was made up of two metacognitive tests, the Reading Awareness Scale (ESCOLA; acronym in Spanish) and a Spanish adaptation of Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), and one test of reading comprehension, the Evaluation of Reading Processes for Secondary Education Students (PROLEC-SE; acronym in Spanish). Students with ADHD had lower achievement on tests of reading comprehension compared to the control group. Nevertheless, our results suggest their difficulties did not stem from reading comprehension problems, but rather from alterations in their Executive Functions, because when subjects' reading comprehension was equalized, students with ADHD still exhibited a lower level of Metacognition, particularly when it came to planning.
The application of metacognitive strategies is considered a basic skill of the student at any educational level. In the present study, we evaluate the reduced version of the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI-R) in Spanish, a self-report instrument designed to measure the metacognitive awareness of students and their perception of the strategies that they use while they are reading school materials. MARSI-R is formed by three subscales: (a) global reading strategies (GRS), (b) problem-solving strategies, and (c) strategies to support reading. We conducted a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in a Spanish student sample (N = 570) and the results shown relative inadequate fit for the proposed theoretical three-factor model. More important, the three subscales presented a high level of inter-correlation, which raises the need to assess to what extent the construct should be considered as unidimensional. We conducted two additional CFA models: a unidimensional model and a bifactor S-1 model, and the results indicated the presence of a strong general factor related to the GRS subscale. These results have important implications, since they imply that it is more appropriate to use the total score of the instrument derived of the S-1 model instead of the scores derived from each subscale. The bifactor S-1 model has allowed us to develop a closer approximation between the psychometric model and the theoretical model.
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