A Referential Communication Demonstration Versus a Lecture-Only Control: Learning Benefits

To evaluate a demonstration involving active and cooperative learning, 40 students in a cognitive psychology course and 132 students in an introductory psychology course completed a brief multiple-choice pretest on referential communication. Two days later, randomly assigned students either participated in a classroom referential communication demonstration/debriefing or heard only a comparable lecture. The demonstration/debriefing students competed as pairs, within which a communicator described an abstract design that a listener could not see but had to draw as accurately as possible. After 5 more days, all students took a classroom posttest identical to the pretest. Compared to lecture-only students, demonstration/debriefing students in both courses obtained significantly higher posttest, but not pretest, overall scores. However, cognitive and introductory psychology students showed some level of learning and metacognitive differences in their benefits from the demonstration.