<p>While blended learning has been around for sometime, the interplay between lecture recordings, lecture attendance and grades needs further examination particularly for large cohorts of over 1000 students in 500 seat lecture theatres.  This paper reports on such an investigation with a cohort of 1450 first year psychology students’ who indicated whether they frequently attended lectures or not. The division helped ascertain differences and similarities in preferences for utilising online recordings.  Overall, non-frequent attendees were more likely not to use lecture recordings (48.1%) to make up a missed lecture than frequent attendees (34.3%). Surprisingly, in the last week of semester, 29% of students reported not yet accessing lecture recordings. Students had the intention to use lecture recordings as they envisaged these to be helpful for learning and commented that they would be adversely affected if recordings were not available. In fact, students are passionate about lecture recordings. Analytics show that after lecture 7, each lecture recording attracted 600 or less unique visits (hits) supporting the finding that most students make strategic use of learning resources available within the blended learning environment.</p>

Adult secrecy research has found a memory-enhancing effect for information kept secret as the secret is mentally rehearsed each time the adult is required to prevent it being reported (e.g. Lane & Wegner, 1994). The present study examined possible memory-enhancing effects of children keeping information secret. Two hundred and thirty two five to eight year olds took part in a puppet-making task. During the task the puppet-maker sprayed glitter onto the puppets. Half the children were told to keep a secret (that the spray had been taken from Disneyland) and the other half (the control group) were merely told the spray was from Disneyland. One week later the children were interviewed either by the puppet-maker (the secret-giver) or by the puppet-maker's friend (the secret-novice). The five to six year olds showed no effect of the secret condition, whereas the seven to eight year olds made significantly less errors in their free recall in the secret condition compared to the control condition. There was no effect of the secret condition on children's suggestibility to leading questions. However, both age groups were significantly more suggestible when interviewed by the secret-giver. Finally, both age groups showed a recall deficit in the secret condition.