The lecture-test method of teaching introductory college courses focuses on the teacher rather than the learner, encourages passive rather than active learning, promotes individual more than cooperative learning, and targets short-term retention at the expense of long-term learning. An alternative course format for Introduction to Psychology emphasizes active learning using computer-based laboratories and collaborative groups. The world-wide web is used to deploy course materials, laboratory experiences, information retrieval and evaluation exercises, and practice quizzes "any time, anywhere." Nearly 200 students have been taught during two offerings of this course. Evaluations of student satisfaction and learning showed that students appreciated the flexibility of the on-line format, and that they learned as much as students taught in the traditional lecture-test format. The evaluations also revealed those components of the course that need improvement. The proposed project aims to improve the quality of the collaborative group interactions, to increase the amount of student learning through increased opportunities for active learning enabled by technology, to identify those students for whom an on-line course is most appropriate, to conduct a thorough evaluation of the on-line course format to determine how it can be used to improve both immediate and long-term learning of content, and to disseminate the findings so that the course may serve as a national model for the social and behavioral sciences. Additional laboratory experiences will be created for delivery on the web, and course materials will be enhanced during Year 01. During the next four semesters, course components will be developed and evaluated, always comparing the on-line course to concurrent versions of conventional lecture courses. The project will also develop four Web based courses in the College of Education using the same set of principles and tools to allow elementary education majors to take initial courses in ma thematics teaching and science teaching in this format. It is hypothesized that this will further sensitize future teachers to the importance of teaching approaches and to learning how to assess what is working and not working with their students. Various group activities and different advanced organizers will be evaluated. Learning styles and personality traits will be assessed in order to determine the characteristics of those students who benefit most from the on-line course format.
