Abstract

In the summer of 1969, the writer tried out modified Roger's approach, as discussed essentially in Freedom to Learn, to instruct the Educational Psychology course. At the very beginning of the course, he handed out a memorandum to the class, outlining the rationale and the procedure of this approach. After he had sensed "frustration" and "loss" from a majority of the class, he was forced not to adhere strictly to what was originally stated in the memorandum, especially during the first half of the course, hoping that students would gradually feel comfortable with this approach. However, as a result of this change, few students were frustrated. In the second half of this course, students became adjusted to it and began to like it. Throughout the course, students had produced more and better, according to the instructor's several years of teaching, than what he would usually expect of his students under the conventional system. At the end students were asked to evaluate the approach used in this course anonymously. Their evaluations were rated on a 5-point scale. It was found that students were generally in favour of this modified approach. Meanwhile, a self-evaluation took place in order to find out how much they learned from this course, and they were asked to assign themselves a mark. As soon as students' self-assigned and instructor's assigned marks were obtained, a t test was performed. The t value was not statistically significant. What this finding indicated was that there was no difference between the marks that students asked for and the marks that the instructor actually gave them.