Having used an interteaching lesson plan for both Research Methods and Cognitive Development, and already asked students their perception of the instructional strategy, we’ve now been able to examine students results on a midterm exam. The midterm was 50 multiple-choice questions in 60-minutes and covered five topics; there are 77 students enrolled in the Social-Cognitive Psychology course; 61 are enrolled in Honors and 16 are not.
From the recently-completed midterm in Social-Cognitive Psych, the exam randomly pulled five questions for each student from a bank of 25. The non-Honors students’ mean score was 77.9% and the Honors students’ mean score was 86.4%.
Because the semester-long Social-Cognitive Psych course is only one-year old, our comparison data is from the first iteration of the course and from the prior year, which was the final year we offered “AP Psychology.” For the last year of AP Psychology, 2016–2017, students’ mean was 56.2 out of 65 (86.5%) with a median and mode of 57. For 2017–2018, the Introduction, History, and Research Methods unit test was worth 50-points; the student mean was 40.8 (81.6%) with a median and mode of 42.
It appears as if students performed better when we taught an AP Psychology course (averaging 86.5% on the unit test.) It should be noted that those students all met the minimum 3.2 GPA requirement; further, the “textbook” that year, upon which the exam was based, was just the AP Psychology Barron’s Guide. I’ll argue that the average student then was different than the average students now found in our heterogeneous classes, and that the unit test itself had easier questions than those found on exams in the new Social-Cognitive Psychology class (even though “Research Methods” is a fairly standard topic across lower-division psychology courses.
Comparing just last year’s Social-Cognitive Psychology exam (81.6%) to this year’s assessment across Honors and non-Honors (82.2%), we didn’t see the 5–7% gain that Saville et al. (2006) reported (shown above). The above just addressed the Research Methods content; I have not yet done the analysis for the Cognitive Development content.
References
Saville, B. K., Zinn, T. E., Neef, N. A., Van Norman, R., & Ferreri, S. J. (2006). A Comparison of Interteaching and Lecture in the College Classroom. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 39(1), 49–61. http://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2006.42-05