CHANGE IN STUDENT ATTITUDES TOWARD INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY TEXTS¹

Abstract

This study is an outgrowth of a previous study by Thomas Banta. Banta (1963) used a progranmaed text, Skinner and Holland's Th___ee Analysis of Behavior, in one of his classes.To find out how well his students liked the new text, he obtained several student ratings during the first part of the semester.He found that the mean ratings changed from favorable to nearly neutral during the first three weeks of the semester.A question which remained unanswered in Banta's work is this:Is the change in student ratings a function of the type of text being rated? That is, would such a change be found if students rated other, more conventional texts early in the semester? A programmed text might be considered a novelty.Perhaps if students were to rate a conventional text, no such change in ratings would be found. ProcedureStudents in five sections of an introductory psychology coulse at the University of Wisconsin rated their texts using the same six scales which Banta employed.The six scales, similar to those used by Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (1957) in their study of the semantic differential, included the bipolar adjectives fast-slow, dull-interesting, tenserelaxed, good-bad, fair-unfair, and deep-shallow.The 922 students in the five sections rated their texts four times during the first eight weeks of the second semester.Rating times were separated by at least a one-week interval.Four introductory psychology texts were rated.