and a few representative letters were incorporated into a required freshman seminar for psychology students. Many of the freshmen indicated that it was helpful to know that other students had once been just as confused and appreciated having "successful" students (i.e., graduating seniors) expend the time to help them negotiate their careers as psychology majors. The quantitative results were shared with students enrolled in the senior seminar after they had completed the exercise. We have published the most common advice in the department's Psychology Handbook and disseminated Table 1 in workshops on preparing for graduate school. The results have also been discussed as a formal agenda item at a departmental faculty meeting, and we plan to include them as part of the program self-assessment.Congruent with the cumulative research on peer influence in college, students have been exceptionally receptive to the advice rendered by fellow students. Such peer advice is presented as a supplement to, but not a substitute for, faculty advising (Goldberg, 1981). Fellow students provide an invaluable insider's view to the college experience, and this view is carefully complemented with faculty advising, empirical research, and departmental materials.
Educational benefits of computer-assisted instruction (CAl) were investigated. A quasi-experimental design contrasted learningoutcomes of students in an introductory psychology class that incorporated CAl exercises to students in a lecture-only introductory psychology class. A numberof potential mediating variables, such as instructor, size of class, textbook, and year in school, were controlled. Analysis of students' final examination scores indicated that students in the lecture-plus-CAI section obtained higher scores than students in the lecture-only section, and these higher scores were due to their better performance on concepts that were taught in both lecture and CAl exercises. These findings offer modest support for the use of CAl as a supplement to lecture in teaching psychology, particularly for domain-specific learning.This article describes a computer-assisted, interdisciplinary course in decision making developed to promote student participation, critical thinking, and enhanced decision making through the use of interactive experimental paradigms. The course uses Macintosh computers for simple data entryand presentation, for more complex calculations and extended graphics, andfor stimulus presentation and data collection. Students experience firsthand 20 psychology and economics exercises that illustrate a
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.