5. The Nomenclature of Organic Compounds 5.3 Results 5.3.4 Learning Outcomes In beginning to analyse the learning outcomes, a one way analysis of variance test was performed on the pre-test scores in order to determine whether the students at each of the four universities were from the same population. The results of this showed that there were significant differences between all groups and so the pre and post test scores are presented by university. Furthermore, whilst every effort was made to make the learning situations at each site as similar as possible, there were inevitable differences of emphasis by members of academic staff in presenting the package, in the environment in which students were working and in the timing of the learning episode which ranged from the first week of term for some students to late November for others. All these factors mean that the results must be examined individually.

TABLE 3: Pre and Post test results (N= 318) UNIVERSITY PRESCORE Range 0 - 10 POSTSCORE Range 0 - 10 t VALUE 2 TAILED P S.E.M Manchester 4.4078 5.6408 -6.46 .000 .191 Bath 5.2877 6.2466 -3.57 .001 .268 Liverpool 4.4615 5.8654 -4.53 .000 .310 Brighton 5.311 5.4222 -1.82 .072 .226

A paired t test was performed on pre-test and post test scores for each separate set of results. Table 3 presents the results for each university. This shows there was a significant increase in scores from pre to post test in all but one institution. The following quotes support the view that the students learnt from the package: "The package provides a clear and enjoyable means of instruction and the self-test options were very helpful" - Questionnaire response - Manchester "The program is good. I definitely learned from it and would like more time to make notes from it" - Questionnaire response - Liverpool At Brighton, where the difference in scores was just outside accepted levels of significance, the pre-test scores were highest. This may indicate that these students required less teaching in this area, although their post test results are still lower than at the other institutions. Some students from Brighton felt that the package was too easy and during the discussion group, the following were amongst the comments made: "The compounds they used were very basic" - Discussion group at Brighton "It could be more difficult, that would help. I'm not saying that we still don't get basic questions wrong but at the same time it would be nice to have a more difficult program to really cover what we're going to do" - Discussion group at Brighton This higher level of expectation may therefore be a factor in the poorer results from Brighton. The students had also been given a self study guide at the start of their course and, although they were not going to work on this until later in the year, they may have seen the kinds of examples in the guide on the subject of Nomenclature and may have been influenced by this. If so, it is interesting to note the possible effects of distributing advanced material whilst students are studying more basic material. Nonetheless, most of the results appear to show that the students have made learning gains, even within the short time frame of one hour. There was evidence from discussion groups and questionnaires of some difficulties with the package. As well as frequent multiple choice questions in each section, students are required to type in the full name of a given structure. The package allows only absolutely correct answers, including the correct number of commas and hyphens. This frequently proved to be challenging for the students: "One fault was that it didn't explain clearly where to put the commas and dashes" -Questionnaire response - Bath "You have to be very precise in your answer. I didn't think they would be that harsh"-Discussion group - Brighton 7/11/95 "It was the punctuation that confused us. Because we'd done the name right and we were looking at it saying, "Well, this is right. Why isn't it right?" and it was the punctuation that we couldn't get right." - Discussion group - Liverpool 24/10/95 Before studying the package, many students obviously felt the punctuation was not an essential part of the name. Whilst it is clear that many students found entering compound names difficult and would have liked more help with the punctuation aspects in particular, it is also clear that the package was very successful in raising the students awareness of the importance of this need for accuracy and in particular, the correct punctuation, in addition to the correct name. Several other features of the data produced are worthy of further examination, for example the link between each learning objective and the specific pre and post test questions which relate to it, in order to determine more precisely which areas of the package the students learnt from and which provided more difficulty. Unfortunately there has not been time to re-enter all the scores in order to do this, at this stage. However, this is linked to the areas of the package students worked through which will be covered in the next section. One further area which has been examined is whether those with a low pre-test score show more improvement than those with a higher pre-test score. For the purposes of this investigation, out of a possible 10, scores less than or equal to 4 were deemed to be low. Making 4 the cut off point divides the students into two reasonably equal groups (139 <=4 , 179 >=5), making 3 the cut off point alters this balance quite considerably, with a low scoring group of just 78 students. Paired t tests were once again conducted on the data and produced the following results:

TABLE 4: results FOR STUDENTS WITH LOW PRE-TEST SCORES Students with pre-test score <= 4 (N=139) UNIVERSITY STUDENT NUMBERS PRESCORE POSTSCORE t value P value Manchester 56 3.1786 5.2321 -8.47 .000 Bath 25 3.4000 5.9200 -6.10 .000 Liverpool 26 2.8846 5.6154 -9.93 .000 Brighton 32 3.2500 4.9063 -4.82 .000

TABLE 5: results FOR STUDENTS WITH HIGH PRE-TEST SCORES Students with pre-test score >=5 (N= 179) UNIVERSITY STUDENT NUMBERS MEAN PRESCORE MEAN POSTSCORE t value P value Manchester 47 5.8723 6.1277 -1.09 .282 Bath 48 6.2708 6.4167 -.51 .612 Liverpool 26 6.0385 6.1154 -.18 .856 Brighton 58 6.4483 6.1724 1.08 .285

Tables 4 and 5 show quite clearly that those who began with a low score were able to improve significantly at all four institutions and that those which began with a score of 5 or over showed a much lower level of improvement. In table 4 the high t values and levels of significance do appear to indicate that the package has served these lower achievers better than each group as a whole. This emphasises its role as a revision aid where the easier aspects of the subject are the areas showing most improvement amongst the students. The results for Brighton confirm the earlier findings where those that found the package "too basic" made fewer learning gains. The number of students scoring 5 or more also represents a sizeable proportion (64%)of the total at that institution. This links in closely with the way the students worked through the package which is discussed in section 5.4.5.