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The Case Study: Undergraduate Psychology

Robert Holt is an Associate Professor of Psychology in George Mason's College of Arts and Sciences. Holt first introduced some innovations into his undergraduate course on social psychology using WebCT's online quiz tools in the 1999 Fall semester. Holt's WebCT course is notable for two reasons.

First, his use of the quiz tool allowed students to receive immediate feedback about how successfully they were learning the key concepts in their reading assignments. Using these online quiz results, Holt identified those concepts that the students had trouble grasping and made the necessary adjustments to his classroom teaching to address the problem areas. As a consequence of these online assessments, the classroom lectures were able to anticipate the needs of the students in ways that better promoted the instructor's stated learning outcomes.

In this 200-level survey course in social psychology that emphasizes theories, methods and data in the field, Holt's original instructional cycle was based solely on the twelve chapters of the course text and classroom lectures. This included an assigned reading of one chapter in the text each week, a lecture and class discussion, three exams during the semester and a final exam at the end of the semester (Figure 1). Typically, the entire instructional cycle for each chapter was covered in one week.

Instructional Cycles and Conditional Release

The New Cycle: Self-Assessment