Only out in Research in Learning Applied science, is our paper Students' appointment with a collaborative wiki tool predicts enhanced written exam performance. This is an observational written report which tries to reply the question of how students on my undergraduate cerebral psychology course tin can meliorate their grades.

1 of the swell misconceptions near sudying is that you simply need to larn the material. Courses and exams which encourage regurgitation don't help. In fact, likewise as memorising content, you also need to empathize it and reflect that understanding in writing. That is what the exam tests (and what an undergraduate education should test, in my opinion). A few years ago I realised, marking exams, that many students weren't fulfilling their potential to understand and explain, and were relying as well much on simply recalling the lecture and textbook content.

To address this, I got rid of the textbook for my class and introduced a wiki – an editable set of webpages, using which the students would write their ain textbook. An inspiration for this was a quote from Francis Bacon:

Reading maketh a full human being,
conference a ready human being,
and writing an exact man.

(the reviewers asked that I remove this quote from the paper, and so information technology has to go here!)

Each year I cleared the wiki and encouraged the people who took the course to read, write and edit using the wiki. I also kept a record of who edited the wiki, and their final exam scores.

The paper uses this data to show that people who made more than edits to the wiki scored more than highly on the test. The obvious confound is that people who score more than highly on exams will also exist the ones who edit the wiki more. We tried to account for this statistically by including students' scores on their other psychology exams in our analysis. This has the outcome – we contend – of removing the general effect of students' propensity to enjoy psychology and written report hard and isolate the boosted effect of using the wiki on my item course.

The result, pleasingly, is that students who used the wiki more scored better on the final exam, even accounting for their general tendancy to score well on exams (equally measured by grades for other courses). This means that even among people who generally do badly in exams, and did desperately on my exam, those who used the wiki more did improve. This is show that the wiki is beneficial for anybody, not just people who are skilful at exams and/or highly motivated to report.

Here'south the graph, Figure one from our paper:

wikigraph

This is a large effect – the benefit is around five percentage points, easily plenty to lift you from a mid two:ii to a 2:ane, or a mid ii:1 to a commencement.

Fans of wiki research should check out this recent paper Wikipedia Classroom Experiment: bidirectional benefits ofstudents' appointment in online production communities, which explores potential wider benefits of using wiki editing in the classroom. Our newspaper is unique for focussing on the bottom line of last course grades, and for trying to address the derange that students who piece of work harder at psychology are probable to both go higher examination scores and utilise the wiki more than.

The true test of the benefit of the wiki would exist an experimental intervention where one group of students used a wiki and another did something else. For a word of this, and give-and-take of why we believe editing a wiki is so useful for learning, you lot'll take to read the paper.

Thanks become to my collaborators. Harriet reviewed the literature and Herman instaled the wiki for me, and did the assay. Together we discussed the research and wrote the paper.

Full citation:
Stafford, T., Elgueta, H., Cameron, H. (2014). Students' engagement with a collaborative wiki tool predicts enhanced written exam performance. Research in Learning Technology, 22, 22797. doi:10.3402/rlt.v22.22797