A comparison of the personalized system of instruction and a conventional biology course on the achievement of junior college freshmen

Abstract

The effect of using a Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) method in teaching freshman biology in junior college and the relationship between biology achievement and selected variables were investigated. The sample of eighty freshmen was divided into two groups, experimental and control, and data were collected after one semester of treatment. Adjusted scores on the post‐test were significantly different for the class using the PSI method. There was no significant difference between the sexes. Career motivation was the only significant factor between males and females. The significant predictors of biology achievement were college grade point average, treatment group, and the California Achievement Test composite score. The next group of predictors consisted of career motivation, fear motivation, and family size.

Protocol for a systematic review: 21st century adaptive teaching and individualized learning operationalized as specific blends of student‐centered instructional events: a systematic review and meta‐analysis

“…Examples of various attempts to make teaching and learning more adaptive can be found in both the early and current research literature. They include, though not limited to, mastery learning (e.g., Bloom, 1968), Personalized Systems of Instruction or PSI (e.g., Keller, 1968; Gifford & Vicks, 1982; Davies, 1981), assorted forms of peer instruction (e.g., Mazur, 1997), various reciprocal reading/writing activities (e.g., Huang & Yang, 2015; MacArthur, Schwartz & Graham, 1991), adaptive hypermedia (Brusilovsky, 2001), accommodation for individual learning styles (e.g., Özyurt & Özyurt, 2015) and more recent Intelligent Tutoring Systems or ITS (e.g., Huang & Shiu, 2012; VanLehn, 2011). To some extent, findings of primary research on these and related instructional practices have been summarized in two rather sparse collections of meta‐analyses separated in time by almost three decades.…”