Students in CON Prematriculation Program Use Web-based ‘Learning Skills’ Instruction

By Judy Garrett

Increasing evidence from individual ‘learning skills’ counseling sessions at UAMS suggests that one reason for low achievement is that students often do not realize what they know and don’t know until after they get the results of their first round of tests.  The goal of a collaborative project between OED and the College of Nursing (CON) faculty to address this problem has resulted in a series of web-based lessons to teach students some of the skills needed to monitor their understanding as they are studying.

The first step in the project was to identify skills that students needed to monitor their understanding.  Some of these skills were the ability to identify relevant material, visualize lecture and textbook information, condense and organize information, and the ability to identify learning tasks represented by different types of test questions. 

Data from several UAMS studies have verified the importance of comprehension monitoring of some of the above skills.  In one study (Garrett and Perrot, 2002), two groups of students in a pathophysiology course were matched on the basis of scores on a previous exam.  One group used web-based practice exams several times to monitor their learning, along with study sessions after each practice test.  The other group answered practice test questions only once, the night before the exam.

When test scores of the two groups on the next exam were compared, the average score of students who used practice questions more than once to monitor their learning was 87.2.  The average score of students who used the practice questions only once was 81.4, which was significantly lower than that of the group which used practice tests to continuously monitor their learning ( p<0 .01).  

In another study (Garrett, Gardner, Born, and Alman, 2004), three skills thought to be involved in comprehension monitoring—1) comprehend spoken information (students sketch structures as descriptions are read), 2) interpret diagrams (students describe and/or answer questions that test their understanding of diagrams), and 3) traditional reading comprehension, such as passages typically included on entrance exams—were studied in a group of entering College of Pharmacy students.  With achievement on the first physiology exam as the criterion variable, the ability to comprehend spoken information (r = 0.23) and the ability to interpret diagrams (r=0.24) correlated significantly with achievement on the first exam (p < 0 .05), whereas reading comprehension skills similar to those traditionally tested on entrance exams did not correlate significantly with achievement.

Materials from actual textbooks for two entry-level CON courses, Health Assessment and Foundations, were used in developing examples and exercises included in each instructional program.  Each program (PowerPoint slides with audio) was compressed using Impatica so it could be used more easily by students who connect to the Internet by phone modems.  Another component of the learning skills program was a pretest (not web-based) to assess certain types of learning skills considered to be used in comprehension monitoring. 

Draft versions of these materials have been used in ‘face-to-face’ CON prematriculation sessions since 2003.  After two years of testing, final editing of slides was completed, audio for these programs was recorded by Dale Seidenschwarz of Creative Services, and the web-based materials were ready for use on May 19, 2005.

One advantage of these web-based materials is that they will be available to all entering CON students, not just those participating in the prematriculation program.  Although these materials are specific to learning skills that are especially important in CON courses, another advantage of these programs is that they can be used as a template to develop ‘learning skills’ for students in other UAMS programs.  For further information about these materials, contact Dr. Judy Garrett at 686-7349.

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