Retention of Knowledge

Abstract

The study was conducted to determine if students graded by the contract method (experimental group) would retain, for a 5-week period, the knowledge level possessed at the end of a 9-session venereal disease unit and if the contract students would retain as much, or more, knowledge than students graded by the traditional method (control group) . Ss for the grade contract group (n = 27) were drawn from two junior high school health classes and Ss for the traditional grading group ( n = 30) were drawn from two other health classes. Results of the ANOVA tests conducted at the .05 alpha level indicated that 1. ) the grade contract students, as well as the tra ditional grading students, retained the knowledge level possessed at the end of the unit, and that 2. ) the contract students did not retain any more, or less, knowledge than the traditional grading students. GRADING HAS remained among the problems of I education in which an adequate solution has not been found. From the kindergarten or first grade to the graduate level, most of the student's and teacher's life revolves, directly or indirectly, around the ever present grading system. Almost every school and teacher has been beset by controversies concerning the evaluation of pupil progress (6) . The traditional grading method has been widely criticized recently in numerous articles and books (5, 10, 12) . Suggestions for alleviating the grading controversy have ranged from the elimination of grades to the adoption of alternate grading methods (6:292-307) . The grade contract method has been one of the most widely adopted alternate grading technique. Numer ous articles have been recently published which pre sent contracts used by teachers and which describe specific advantages of the grade contract (3, 11, 18, 19,20) . One might conclude from the contents of these articles that the contract method is a more desirable grading technique than the traditional grading system. However, very little research has been conducted to determine the effectiveness of the grade contract method in contrast to the traditional method. The majority of grade contract studies dealt only with students graded by the contract method. Most of these studies found favorable student performance and positive student reaction toward the contract method (2, 15, 19) . Only three research projects that compared the performance of grade contract I students to traditional grading students have been located in the literature (9, 14, 17) . The results of these studies were mixed?some findings favored the grade contract method and others revealed no difference between contract and traditional methods. None of the grade contract research studies dealt with the variable that is the concern of this study, the retention of knowledge. Certainly the topic of knowledge retention is not new to researchers in psychology and education. Many of the educational studies have compared the retention of knowledge of students taught by various instructional techniques (1, 4, 8, 13). However, the analysis of knowledge retention of students evaluated by the various alternate methods of grading has been markedly absent. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine knowl edge retention as a variable of students graded by the contract and traditional grading methods in order to provide for teachers further evidence for choosing a grading method.