Evaluation of a Web Site in Cognitive Science

Abstract

A public Web site (Goolkasian & Van Wallendael, 2001), established to provide educational materials in cognitive science, served as the primary text for an interdisciplinary course. We tracked student use of the Web site online and with self-report questionnaires. A majority (74%) of the students rated the Web site to be as useful or more useful than a traditional textbook. Although time spent online with the Web materials predicted scores for 2 of the 4 exams, class attendance was the strongest predictor of exam performance.Web-based resources for college teaching have evolved together with the Internet. According to Wolfe (2001b), 40% of college courses today list Web resources in the syllabus, and over 25% of college courses have their own Web pages. The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning (Malloy & Hanley, 2001) provided a comprehensive collection of learning materials for psychology instruction, indexing more than 260 Web sites related to psychology. Some major issues are the usefulness and effectiveness of the sites for instruction in psychology. Although much of the debate is over the use of Web materials for distance education (e.g., Lawson, 2000;Waschull, 2001), there are concerns about student willingness to use Web-based materials in lieu of traditional textbooks.Studies show positive learning outcomes from online exercises, tutorials, and virtual laboratories in a variety of fields. Cao and Bengu (2000) evaluated a Web-based intelligent tutoring tool for a general chemistry laboratory. This tool integrated an interactive, online laboratory manual with text material. Content of the Web materials was also available to the control group in printed form. Cao and Bengu found that students who used the Web tools were better at problem solving than control students who had not used the Web tools. Aberson, Berger, Healy, Kyle, and Romero (2000) evaluated a Web-based tutorial on the central limit theorem; the tutorial allowed students to draw samples of varying sizes and explore the shapes of the resulting distributions. Aberson et al. found that test scores improved (relative to a pretest) at a rate comparable to that obtained from attending a lecture on the same content.However, some researchers have questioned the usefulness of Web-based learning tools. Eveland and Dunwoody (2001) tested recognition memory for information presented in traditional print versions, in linear Web formats (pages of information were linked in a specific order), and in nonlinear Web formats (topics could be examined in any order). These researchers found that learning from print was better than

Students’ and Instructor’s Perspective on the use of Blackboard Platform for Delivering an Engineering Course

“…It terms of application of Blackboard, results from the study were consistent with previous research findings for courses other than engineering discipline (Goolkasian, Wallendael and Gaultney, 2003;Warren and Holloman, 2005;Yip, 2004). Therefore, it seems that students in general did indeed possess positive attitudes toward the use of e-learning software like Blackboard.…”

An Action Research

“…These results do not support Wang and Newlin's (2000) study in which they found out the number of online discussion postings correlated with exam grades. However, our findings correspond with other studies revealing no correlation between time spent online and achievement (e.g., Sadik & Reisman, 2004;Reisetter & Boris, 2004;Ramos & Yudko, 2008;Goolkasian, Wallendael, & Gaultney, 2003). Students' academic achievement is mostly based on other variables, such as learning motivation (Nenniger, 1992), teacher quality (Darling-Hammond & Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, 1999), or self-efficacy (Zajacova, Lynch, & Espenshade, 2005).…”

“…Some studies, however, indicate the discussion board postings have little to no value to the exam outcomes (e.g., Sadik & Reisman, 2004;Reisetter & Boris, 2004;Ramos & Yudko, 2008). Goolkasian, Wallendael, and Gaultney (2003) used both tracking records and selfreport measures to determine students' time spent online, and they indicated that there is a weak correlation between time spent on online materials and exam performance.…”

Searching Under Cups for Clues About Memory: An Online Demonstration

“…Because the Sternberg paradigm seems arcane to students, we developed an online demonstration to help make this research and its implications more concrete (the demonstration is available at http://www.bates.edu/∼tkahan/stm; it requires a PC platform and Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Netscape Web browser). Demonstrations of psychological topics attract and hold students' interest and motivate students to learn outside the classroom (Bernstein, 2006), and online demonstrations and multimedia teaching approaches increase performance outcomes in the classroom (e.g., Aberson, Berger, Healy, Kyle, & Romero, 2000;Aberson, Berger, Healy, & Romero, 2003;Erwin & Rieppi, 1999) and receive higher ratings from students than traditional classroom techniques (e.g., DeBord, Aruguete, & Muhlig, 2004;Goolkasian, Van Wallendael, & Gaultney, 2003;Sommer & Sommer, 2003). Although it is unclear whether computer-based demonstrations are more effective than traditional demonstrations, some classroom activities are easier using computerbased approaches (Neuhoff, 2000), and students can use Web-based demonstrations outside of class.…”