Even though students attend introductory psychology classes at Indiana University with 200 or more of their peers, they receive quick feedback on their ability to comprehend lectures and reading materials.

Professors Jim Craig and Gabriel Formmer quiz their students on a regular basis with questions they create using Questionmark, produced by Presence Corporation. Every week, each student is required to visit one of a dozen or so campus computer clusters -- PC-based computer labs connected via a campus-wide network. The software is loaded onto a server in the Psychology Department, from which students access the program in the computer clusters. The test responses are automatically recorded in a file created by Questionmark on the server, which can be accessed by the instructor.

Our concern is that first-year students may not have good study habits and may not be keeping up with required readings, which would hinder their ability to understand the lecture material, says Craig. By quizzing them on a regular basis, we can monitor their performance and direct their thinking.

Students are required both to take the multiple-choice quiz on the week’s reading and class sessions and to achieve a certain score. They are allowed to repeat the quiz as often as necessary to make the required score, giving them opportunity to review.

Students also use the system to give their instructors a lecture response by answering an open-ended question once a week. They may be asked to say what material they understood least or to relate some personal experience on topics covered in the lectures.

Craig has found this particularly useful because the process of responding to paper submissions were cumbersome and time-consuming. He usually identifies three or four points that students had problems understanding and begins his next lecture by giving additional information or new examples to explain the material better.

The psychology instructors have used Questionmark software for about two years, and Frommer comments that his students find the quizzes helpful in preparing for exams. He has taken this use of Questionmark a step further and is in the process of preparing exercises that correspond to the 12 sections of the introductory psychology course. He has imported text as well as images into the software. Each exercise consists of a set of lecture screens interspersed with quiz screens on the preceding lecture screen. The lecture screens form a condensed version of a lecture, with graphics as well as text. The quiz screens are intended as immediate self-tests for comprehension of the material in the preceding screen (or screens). Students can check the preceding lecture screen before answering the quiz question.

Frommer will teach one section of Introductory Psychology this fall using his Questionmark exercise. Students can read the textbook and use the exercises in the clusters on their own, he explains. Class time will be devoted to demonstrations, video, and more discussion,

Frommer is planner to incorporate video into his exercises with the release of the Windows version of Questionmark. He is also working on a system to distribute the quizzes and exercises to students on disks.

For more information, contact Professor Jim Craig, (812) 855-3926; or Professor Gabriel Frommer, (812) 855-1279; Indiana University, Department of Psychology, Psychology Building, Bloomington, IN 47405-1301; E-mail Frommer@UCS.Indiana.edu or CraigJ@UCS.Indiana.edu.