Psychology and Law Class Performance
Students in my Psychology and Law course take a short test at the beginning and end of the semester with questions relevant to eyewitness memory (click here for full list of questions). Students were unaware that they would be retested at the end of the semester. These questions (except for the final 6) are taken from Benton, Ross, Bradshaw, Thomas, and Bradshaw, 2006, a study that measured eyewitness experts agreement with questions relevant to their expertise. Improvements in agreement were found for 27 out of 36 questions (note that 5 questions were at ceiling so really 27 out of 31).
Figure 1. Proportion of yes responses to questions about eyewitness memory. Students were given a pretest at the beginning of the semester and a posttest at the end. Questions were taken from Benton, Ross, Bradshaw, Thomas, and Bradshaw, 2006. Click here for the full questions associated with each label. N = 21 for PreTest and N = 15 for Posttest).
Students also rated confidence in their answers on a scale from 1-Not at all to 5-Extremely. Confidence rose from 2.90 in the pretest to 3.74 in the posttest. As shown in Figure 2, students confidence in their answers was higher for all 36 questions.
Figure 2. Students confidence rating (1-Not at all to 5-Extremely) in their answers to the eyewitness memory questions.