Dissecting a Scholarly Article

Hypotheses 

MacGuire and MacDonald (2009) sought to investigate various aspects that relate to learning among students. Their study resulted out of the construct that different students take dissimilar times to master the same concepts. The hypotheses that were being tested were three. First they wanted to establish whether attempting quizzes several times improves the performance of students. The second study was whether giving students more time to do tests improves their outcome and whether enticing students with incentives leads to overall better performance. Additionally, the researchers also wanted to establish whether offering incentives to students leads to a larger percentage of attempts on quizzes. On overall, the researchers posit that students learn best through a repetition cycle of learning, testing, and feedback which are components of what is referred to as mastery learning. In regards to the questions under study, MacGuire and MacDonald made several predictions. First, that there was a positive relationship between the number of retakes and high scores obtained. Secondly, that students who would attempt the quizzes early had higher chances of performing better. Thirdly, that offering incentives for students to take tests early would result in a larger percentage of students taking the quizzes early. 

Methods 

To carry out their study, the researchers would test the participants on ten sections of Introductory Psychology (PY 100). Six out of the ten sections had credit attached on them to encourage effective study habits among students. However, the credit only applied if the students took the test as well as attempts within the first five days. There was also extra credit for 2-3 questions that were extracted from class demonstrations or lecture materials. The participants in the study were 270 students who were taking studies in ten sections of introductory psychology during the first semester of 2005. The final analysis, however, was conducted only on results from students who had at least taken an attempt in each of the quizzes. Six of the ten sections offered had incentives if the students took the quizzes within the first five days while the remaining four did not have any incentives. 

The research design is experimental because the researchers’ intentions are to investigate the performance outcomes of students when subjected to various conditions. The independent variables in the study are the various conditions that the students are subjected to such as time, incentives, and number of attempts while the dependent variable is the performance outcomes of the students. Concerning procedure, the students were given freedom to take the quizzes at their own time in the campus computer lab. Every question was available for ten days except one question which was only available for nine days. The questions were picked by the computer randomly from a collection of items, hence there were chances that students could get different questions each time they attempted the questions. The overall determination of the grades involved the highest score for every question. Also, graduate students were available for consultation if the students taking the tests needed insights on how to improve on their next attempts. 

Results 

The study first established that students who attempted the quizzes several times performed better than those who attempted the quizzes only once. Secondly, there was a larger percentage of students who took the tests within the first five days because of the incentives given. Nevertheless, despite there being more students taking up the quizzes in the first five days because of the incentives, they did not record the highest number of retakes on the quizzes. In fact more students in the ‘No Incentive’ group re-attempted the quizzes many times than those in the ‘Incentive’ group. 

Research Flaws 

Perhaps the most outstanding flaw of the study is that is does not point out the type of sampling that was involved in picking the students that were involved in the study. Various factors such as the cultural background of the students need to be considered in such a study. Because the intention of the researchers is to come up with findings that might be used by people from diverse backgrounds, at least there needs to be a mention of such factors to make the study valid and reliable. 

Ethical Considerations 

The most important ethical consideration in such a study is to assure and prove to the participants that their private information will not be accessed by third parties. While the researchers provided students with usernames and passwords to log into the website whenever they felt they were ready to answer the quizzes, it is not clear how the researchers would safeguard the private details of the students. It would have been important to explain how the study would not result in demoralization of some students once it was complete. 

Conclusion 

The study is important to all those stakeholders intending to understand the learning habits of different students. Also, it is vital that all those individuals charged with the task of coming up with learning curriculum to use the findings of the study to guide them. Through the research, it is clear that some students perform best when they are given incentives. It appears that students learn best when their efforts are recognized. Even though every learning institution grapples with the objective of imparting skills to students, stakeholders ought to ensure that the programs are in line with the needs of different groups of students. 

References  

McGuire, M. J., & MacDonald, P. M. (2009). Relation of early testing and incentive on quiz performance in introductory psychology: An archival analysis.  Journal of Instructional Psychology ,  36 (2), 134-142.