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Replication: A Teaching Technique and its Impact on Student Open-Closedmindedness

The problem for the study was the lack of research on the effect of the empirical replication technique on student closedmindedness. The replication technique requires the student to repeat, or replicate, studies originally conducted by social scientists. In this sense, replication is roughly analogous for the social sciences to what laboratory experiments are for the natural sciences. Additionally, the relationship between college student adjustment-maladjustment and open-closedmindedness were explored while controlling for sex and academic achievement.
The control group (N•61) attended two lectures and a discussion section per week which dealt with introductory social science materials. The experimental group (N•BS) was exposed to the normal instruction plus performing empirical replications. The data were analyzed using three stages of statistical analysis; Pearson product-moment correlations, two-way analysis of variance, and covariance.
The difference between the posttest dogmatism means of replication and control students was not significant at the .05 level. However, the null hypothesis preducting no difference between maladjusted and nonmaladjusted subjects mean posttest D-Scale scores was rejected at the .01 level of significance, Although the replication control group posttest difference was not significant at the .05 level, the reduction in mean pre to post D-Scale mean scores for the experimental group was twice the reduction for the control group and would have been significant with alpha set at .10. These findings lead to the conclusion that although its effect was not statistically significant in this study, the replication technique may still hold educational promise meriting further research.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTAHS/oai:digitalcommons.usu.edu:etd-5143
Date01 May 1972
CreatorsDecker, Dale H.
PublisherDigitalCommons@USU
Source SetsUtah State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceAll Graduate Theses and Dissertations
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