A PROGRAMMED SECOND‐YEAR COURSE ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING PART I: BACKGROUND

Abstract

In recent years, a start has been made in applying the principles of programmed learning to whole courses of tuition. At the university level, such individual instruction has been used mainly with first‐year students. This series of three articles is concerned with an attempt to follow a similar procedure in a second‐year university course on “The Psychology of Learning.” Thirty‐three students took part, and the first four exercises that they completed were aimed at finding out something about their views on university teaching, their study methods and their prior knowledge of the concepts to be covered in the course. The students’ responses revealed wide individual differences in attitudes, learning methods and achievement The relative difficulty of the various concepts, dealt with in the last exercise reported in this first article, provided a rough guide to the sequence of topics for the remainder of the course.