| Purpose of the study. This study was designed to measure the effects of CD-ROM textbook integration on student achievement and student cognition-level-attainment for undergraduate general biology students. Four sections of general biology were selected as the study group. Two sections served as the experimental group receiving CD-ROM textbook integration. The remaining two sections served as the control group, and were taught biological content utilizing a traditional textbook.; Procedure. This study employed a pre-experimental research design, static group comparison (Ary, Jacobs, & Razavieh, 1996: 331), to determine if a CD-ROM textbook had significant effects on student cognition-level-attainment and content achievement of undergraduate biology students. The study was conducted during the 2001 spring semester at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. The duration of the treatment was approximately sixteen weeks. Four sections of general biology (N = 101) were selected as the study group. Two of the four sections of general biology (n = 48) were randomly selected by the researcher via coin toss to serve as the experimental group, Group A, and were taught biological content utilizing a CD-ROM Textbook. The remaining two sections of general biology (n = 53) served as the control group, Group B, and were taught biological content utilizing a traditional textbook. Various statistical tests were used in analysis of the data. The ten null hypotheses were tested at the .05 level of significance. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences program (SPSS), version 9.0 (SPSS, 1999), was used to process the data.; Results. The results determined by this study were the overall effects of the CD-ROM textbook did not significantly differ from the effects of the traditional textbook on student content achievement and cognition-level-attainment.; Conclusions. The utilization of CD-ROM textbook instruction is not superior at improving student achievement of biology content, as measured by overall student biology grades and NABT/NSTA High School Biology Examination scores, compared to traditional textbook instruction. In addition, CD-ROM textbook instruction is not superior at improving student mastery of biology content, as measured by the first three levels of Bloom's taxonomic scale, when compared to traditional textbook instruction. Furthermore, biology students participating in the CD-ROM textbook instruction, when compared to their traditional textbook counterparts, initially scored lower on unit examinations. However, these students scored higher on subsequent unit examinations, strongly indicating a temporal factor with student performance. This conclusion is supported by the findings of McLean et al. (1997). According to the findings of this study (1997), students participating in an electronic instructional medium exhibit an initial frustration level. Familiarization with the new technology over time parallels greatly reduced frustration levels. |
