<p>This descriptive study investigated student academic performance in skills-based word processing courses taught in two different scheduling formats at one small rural western United States university over the period of several years. One scheduling format followed a more traditional approach where courses were taken at the same time as at least one other course and in a time frame more resembling a typical semester. This distributed practice model, or cohort approach, required a prerequisite beginning level course or appropriate substitute course before enrolling in an advanced word processing course, thus spreading the instructional time over a longer timeframe. The other scheduling format allowed students to take only one course at a time, thus a massed practice model, in a compressed time format that presented the contents of the entire course in 18 instructional days. Student academic performance was measured by a subset of equivalent posttest questions that were common to both scheduling formats. Retention performance during the cohort approach was measured by a subset of equivalent questions common to the beginning and advanced cohort courses. The entire population of word processing students at this university was studied and thus there is no generalizability from this study to another population. Participants self-selected into groups by enrolling in course sections. Simple means were used to compute descriptive and comparative statistics. The distributed practice cohort group out-performed the massed practice group by an experimentally important five percent on the posttest. Results from the retention portion of the study indicate additional research is needed.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-03262009-140539 |
| Date | 28 April 2009 |
| Creators | Scott, Shaun Eric |
| Contributors | David R Erickson, Sally Brewer, Merle Farrier, Richard P Hughes, H. Mark Krank |
| Publisher | The University of Montana |
| Source Sets | University of Montana Missoula |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-03262009-140539/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Montana or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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