What Would You Tell Professor Wundt?

Abstract

There is great recent concern with the “value added” concept in assessing quality of instruction. Although it is relatively easy to measure some aspects of learning, more general skills and attitudes are harder to assess. In order to measure some of these less accessible changes, students in three history of psychology classes were given a “semiprojective” pretest and posttest. Over the term, student responses increased in level of abstraction, concentrating more on philosophical and general methodological issues and less on specific methodology and empirical findings. Our results suggest that students change their attitudes about what course material is important without being taught specifically to attend to broader issues and that these changes can be measured.