A Comparison of the Performance of Freshmen and Sophomores in a Beginning Course in Psychology

Abstract

The history of the teaching of psychology as a separate subject does not go back much more than a half century. It entered the col lege scene, in this country at least, as some thing one took at the end of the philosophy curriculum, and it was usually called some thing like mental or moral philosophy. When separate departments of psychology were set up, the courses were first open only to juniors and seniors. As the curriculum ex panded, the elementary course was moved down to the sophomore year, at which point it has been very nearly fixed for the last twenty-five years. A relatively small number of institutions offer it to freshmen and an even smaller number of secondary schools teach psychology. One is led to wonder why this halt at the sophomore level should have occurred. It might be that certain work in zoological sci ence has been considered prerequisite to the study of psychology, although we rarely find such a statement in college catalogues. Some have claimed that more than freshman maturity is needed, but this position seems no more logically taken with respect to psychol ogy than any other subject matter in the college curriculum. A more important reason than these positions would seem to be that the places in the first-year students' pro grams have been so generally pre-empted by required courses in longer-established disci plines: foreign language, mathematics, his tory, English, and the older sciences. Whichever of these answers be correct, the question still remains whether sophomores do any better in elementary psychology than freshmen, and if so, why? It is with an approach to this problem that the present study is concerned. In 1937 the home economics curriculum at Rhode Island State College was changed, for certain administrative reasons, so that a re quired one-semester course in psychology, formerly given in the first semester of the sophomore year, was moved to the first * This study was conducted at Rhode Island State College. semester of the freshman year. During the first year of the new arrangement both fresh men and sophomores in the curriculum were enrolled in the course. The freshmen, who numbered forty-four, were in a section by themselves. The thirty-seven sophomore home economics students were in a section totalling sixty-five, which also included students from the sophomore, junior and senior classes of other curriculums in the college. All stu dents in the course used the same text; they listened to lectures that were approximately the same; the same general procedure was followed in class meetings, with the same demonstrations and experiments. The only planned difference between the freshmen and the others was that more attention was given in the freshmen section to the matter of how to study for a college course, and this course in particular. All students took the same ob jective quizzes and examinations, including the final examination.