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John Malacos (2009), in his PsychTeacher post titled "Pre-Post Tests?" wrote:
"Like other Psychology departments, we are using the National
Guidelines and Suggested Learning Outcomes for the Undergraduate
Psychology Major. We are interested in knowing how to measure
progress in these areas. Does anyone do a pre-post test to measure
change in students from the freshmen year to graduation?"
This initiated an 11-post thread on PsychTeacher that's online at
<http://tinyurl.com/bjq4eq>. To access the archives of PsychTeacher
one needs to subscribe, but that takes only a few minutes by clicking
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Annette Taylor (2009a) contributed three messages to the "Pre-Post
Tests?" thread. In her first she wrote:
"I do strongly urge the use of gain scores rather then simple
posttest-pretest formulas. You want to control for initial level of
knowledge. You might want to google Richard Hake's work for a good
example of using gain scores."
In her second post Annette Taylor (2009b) explained:
"I meant to say normalized gain scores are better than simple gain
scores. A simple gain score is posttest-pretest and only tells you
how much a person changed, but tells you nothing about how much they
changed relative to their potential for change."
Still later Annette Taylor (2009c) wrote:
". . . . if you google the phrase 'normalized gain scores' you will
find a wealth of materials that can express the relationship in
change scores much better than I can, and which also discuss this
difference in individual versus group scores."
A search of <http://www.google.com/> for "normalized gain scores"
(with the quotes) yielded 172 hits as of 30 Jan 07:30:00-0800, many
of them superficial. Rather than attempting to plow through 172
Google hits, I would recommend that psychologists consider scanning
"Should We Measure Change? Yes!" [Hake (2008)] where the half-century
old "normalized gain" is thoroughly discussed. The abstract reads:
*******************************************
Formative pre/post testing is being successfully employed to improve
the effectiveness of courses in undergraduate astronomy, biology,
chemistry, economics, geoscience, engineering, . . . .[math]. . .and
physics . . . [but not psychology :-(!!] . . . . . But such testing
is still anathema to many members of the
psychology-education-psychometric (PEP) community. I argue that this
irrational bias impedes a much needed enhancement of student learning
in higher education. I then review the development of diagnostic
multiple-choice tests of higher-level learning; normalized gain and
ceiling effects; the documented two-sigma superiority of interactive
engagement (IE) to traditional passive-student pedagogy in the
conceptually difficult subject of Newtonian mechanics; the probable
neuronal basis for such superiority; education's lack of a community
map; higher education's resistance to change and its related failure
to improve the public schools; and, finally, why we should be
concerned with student learning.
*******************************************
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands.
<[email protected]>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake/>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi/>
<http://HakesEdStuff.blogspot.com/>
REFERENCES [Tiny URL's courtesy <http://tinyurl.com/create.php>.]
Hake, R.R. 2008. "Should We Measure Change? Yes!" online at
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake/MeasChangeS.pdf> (2.5 MB), or
as ref. 43 at <http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>. To appear as a
chapter in "Evaluation of Teaching and Student Learning in Higher
Education, " a Monograph of the American Evaluation Association
<http://www.eval.org/>.
Malacos, J. 2009. "Pre-Post Tests?" PsychTeacher post of 15 Jan 2009
11:39:08 -0500; online at
<http://tinyurl.com/dl5v5p>.
Taylor, A. 2009a. Re: Pre-Post Tests? PsychTeacher post of 15 Jan
2009 09:44:41-0800; online at <http://tinyurl.com/cgn9kk>.
Taylor, A. 2009b. Re: Pre-Post Tests? PsychTeacher post of 15 Jan
2009 16:20:39 -0800; online at <http://tinyurl.com/d3ddqx>.
Taylor, A. 2009c. Re: Pre-Post Tests? PsychTeacher post of 16 Jan
2009 17:10:34 -0800; online at <http://tinyurl.com/cs723g>.
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