Do Students Learn Course Material During Crib Sheet Construction?

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Summary: This study questioned two contrasting hypotheses from previous studies to determine whether the construction of crib sheets before exams helps students learn material (the “coding hypothesis”), or simply provides students with a way to avoid learning material (the “dependency hypothesis”). For participants, this study examined 52 students from a lower division developmental psychology class at an average-sized state university. The gender distribution had a majority of females, and the grade-level of participants was composed of primarily freshmen, yielding an imbalanced population representation. In this study’s procedure, students were instructed to create crib sheets for their first and third course-exams, utilizing both sides of an 8 x 11 inch paper, (which is far larger than the crib sheet dimensions of previous studies). Students were instructed on how to effectively create and use crib sheets. Immediately before taking exams I and III, students were given surprise pretests. They contained questions that would also be seen on their actual exams, but students were not allowed to reference their crib sheets while taking them. Pretest I featured 15 of the 25 questions that would be repeated on exam I, while the pretest for exam III included all 15 of the Exam III questions. The students were informed that their performance on the pretests would not count towards their course grades. The results of this study showed that that students scored significantly higher on both Exam I and III than they did on the pretests. Furthermore, on Exam I, students scored higher on the repeated questions seen on pretest I than the non-repeated questions. After the study had been completed, all students reported that construct... ... middle of paper ... ... randomly assigned to two separate experimental and control groups. Both groups should be told that the exams will count toward their course grades, and each group should be unaware of the conditions applying to the other group. One group should be instructed to create crib sheets, but will be denied the ability to use them when upon receiving pretests, and the other group should be instructed to study normally, without being told that they can use a crib sheet on their exams. Additionally, the allowed crib sheet sizes should be smaller; to promote more mindful selection of information to include. Finally, to measure how crib sheet construction influences the general student population, I would perform the experimental procedure on a variety of classes, in order to have a participant population composed of students equally distributed among various grade levels

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