Evaluation of the intrinsic improvement of the academic and professional results obtained by digital native students in engineering degrees

Resumen

The upcoming fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) society is nowadays showing its first consequences. Digital native students have grown up in an environment characterized by a universal and immediate access to information though complex technological platforms and devices. Besides, specific information technology tools enable the realization of most complicated and costly tasks (i.e. structure calculation) in a very simple and easy manner. As main consequence, informal observations about students in higher education (especially in engineering degrees) show that they present a much lower abstraction reasoning capacity, but they manage (understand, design, implement, etc.) specific and particular technologies in a more creative and innovate way. In fact, the learning curve seems to be faster in digital native students in relation to programming, circuits, graphical design, video, etc. but much slower in respect to theoretical and abstract tasks. In this paper we report an experiment to evaluate the global impact of these two contradictory situations. During the second term of the academic year 2017/18 at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, two experimental groups were built to evaluate and compare the performance and academic and professional results of traditional and digital native students. Results show that digital native students obtain better results in Industry 4.0 tasks and competencies.