This study uses objective measures from essay scripts to report on the interaction between students' strategies in essay writing and tutors' strategies in marking. 98 1st year psychology students completed questionnaires on their essay writing strategies and submitted their essays for analysis. Six tutors who marked the essays were subsequently interviewed. The results indicate that the amount of time spent on the essay, the number of books used, the number of references cited and proportion of research based content actually found in the essays were all strategies that led to higher essay marks. However, there was clear evidence of a mismatch between students and tutors on their perceptions of the most important criteria -students were more concerned with content, whereas tutors were more concerned with argument.
Abstract. This study reports on an attempt to improve the quality of student learning by integrating an Approaches to Learning programme, consisting of 8 workshops, into the first year Psychology curriculum. Written accounts of students' conceptions of learning were collected at the beginning and end of the programme. Content analysis showed that there was a significant shift from naive to more sophisticated conceptions (29% to 60%) in students who had attended more than half the workshops, by the end of the programme. The programme also showed several significant benefits on students' academic performance. Students who attended all the workshops on essay writing and examination taking, obtained higher essay and examination marks than students who did not attend these workshops.However, when we looked at the effects on academic performance of taking a deep approach and holding a more sophisticated conception of learning, the findings were not so clear cut. Depending on the measure used, there was conflicting evidence about whether examination performance or essay performance benefitted the most. The implications of these results are discussed with particular reference to the role of assessment in enhancing the quality of student learning.
The notes of a group of first-year psychology students, which were taken in a lecture on theories of intelligence, were photocopied and analysed. The students were given a questionnaire three weeks later to establish what use they might have made of their notes in the intervening period and their attitudes to notetaking in general. This was immediately followed by a factual recall test. The questionnaire results indicated that the majority of students had made little use of their notes once the lecture was over, but intercorrelations between attitudes to notetaking, the number of words noted and subsequent use of notes were all significantly related to test performance. Combining these measures resulted in even higher correlations with test scores. Men and women students did not differ significantly on any of the measures taken, but women students performed significantly better on the recall test.
This study reports on the part played by lecture notes and other source materials in examination essays. One hundred and thirty-seven examination scripts were analysed in terms of their likely sources (student's lecture notes, lecture-handout, specified reading, extra reading, and untraceable). The results indicated that the more sources the students used, the higher the examination mark they obtained. Further analyses showed that students made choices between the various sources (with women using their notes more than men) and that some choices led to higher examination marks than others. The highest marks were obtained by those students who wrote long answers and who used those sources which most clearly reflected the views of the lecturer -the person who also marked the examination papers.
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