New approaches to learning and assessing through escape rooms in English and Sciences areas

Abstract

Some of the current and ongoing challenges ahead in the teaching of English in science areas include the competitiveness among students and the traditional ways to assess their progress. As a proposal in order to meet these goals, we advocate escape rooms that have been considered as a powerful tool in education. However, we want to incorporate a new element in this educational experience. Students do not have to “play” an escape room but to “create” an escape room. Throughout the creation of the escape room, students had to rely on their group members as there were some tasks that not everybody in the group knew how to solve. That emphasized the teamwork and cooperation rather than competitiveness. Students were revising all the knowledge learnt in different subjects to be able to create the tasks for the escape room and this helped us to assess the understanding of the content. Results showed creativity, collaboration, problem solving and critical thinking at the same time that the challenges and objectives established were completely met.