Individual Students Interest and Argumentative Skills Improvement Using Social Media and AJA Strategy

An educational methodology was developed and implemented to increase both argumentative skills and interest as part of students' critical thinking competence, which would allow them to build structure and justified explanations about how engineering systems works. This methodology increases both students' argumentative skills and students' interest in building structured and justified explanations about how engineering systems work. The developed methodology has 3 steps. First, pre intervention evaluation of both argumentative skills and students' interest in developing supported explanations about how engineering systems work. Second, practice of the Affirmation-Justification-Application of sciences laws (AJA) strategy analyzing specific systems and sharing their explanations in a TikTok account. Third, post evaluation of both argumentative skills and the student's interest in developing supported explanations about how engineering systems work. Individual interest in developing structured explanations of how engineering systems work, was studied as a multidimensional construct divided into 4 dimensions: predisposition, affection, intentionality and appreciation. Our study was carried out in the engineering school of a medium size university with 61 students in 2 different campuses. A comparation between the post-test and pre-test argumentative skills using a 90% confidence hypothesis test for difference of paired means shows a significant improvement in this variable. A similar comparison for student's interest in developing structured arguments shows that after using the proposed methodology, students increased their affection, intentionality, and appreciation dimensions, which imply a significant change in their attitude towards engineering systems analysis. This study provides empirical evidence of how a structured methodology for arguing and describing engineering systems can improve competence development of students. We believe that the proposed methodology can be adopted by teachers in other courses to provide students with a framework for their explanations and analysis.