Charles M. Slem and Ned Schultz
Cal Poly
San Luis Obispo
cslem@calpoly.edu
Introduction
A wide variety of resources have been developed to help students master the content
of introductory psychology courses (e.g. texts, study guides and CD ROM's). Most
of these resources are designed to be used before or during the time period when
the chapter/lecture has been assigned to be completed. However, research on the actual
study habits of students has demonstrated that most activity with these resources
occurs within the few days before an examination. In a survey of college freshmen
(1995 Survey of Student Study Skills), 18.6% began studying for an exam the night
before the exam, and 64.0% began 2 to 3 days before the exam. Procrastination has
been cited as one possible factor (Senecal & Koesner, 1995). Solomon and Rothblum
(1984) reported that 30.1% of introductory psychology students procrastinated on
weekly reading assignments, and 27.6% procrastinated studying for exams.
The purpose of this study was to assess patterns of student use of resources residing
on a World Wide Web platform to determine if their use is similar to the use of traditional
resources.
The authors developed web resources for a large introductory psychology course with
500 students (Slem & Schultz, 1997). The web components included lecture outlines,
links to library and related campus resources, sample exams, chapter outlines, concept
synopses, graphs and figures, definition of terms, and topical world wide web sites.
The students had 24 hour access to these resources. The resources were envisioned
to be used in conjunction with reading and reviewing text chapters as well as previewing
and reviewing lecture material.
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