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Statistical analysis of academic results before and after four years of Bologna

Abstract:

In this paper, a statistical analysis of the performance of telecommunication engineering students who were majoring in electronic systems in the subject Analysis of Circuit I is conducted. Here, the marks of the students before and after four years of being subject to a student-centered teaching and learning approach, implemented as part of the changeover to the Bologna model, are compared. In this research, the statistical population (i.e., marks of the students in 2005 and 2009) were analyzed in detail in order to identify the specific changes after four years of 'Bologna'. Mann-Whitney and proportion tests were used to analyze the effects of the implementation of the Bologna process, which resulted in an improvement in the academic results of the students. In addition, models for the marks of the years 2005 and 2009 were constructed. These models were very different from each other. A mixture of Gaussians was used to model the 2005 marks, and the 2009 marks followed a Gaussian distribution. Thus, before the start of the educational experiment, in the year 2005, the statistical population was heterogeneous, consisting of two subpopulations, and at the end of it the data resulted in being homogeneous. Therefore, the Bologna process has represented a passing from an unsatisfactory model for the 2005 marks to a more 'reasonable' model for the 2009 marks. © 2010 TEMPUS Publications.