AL in College

McGinty, R. L. (1987). All stars to center stage: A pilot study of accelerative learning the School of Business. The Journal of the Society for Accelerative Learning and Teaching,13 (1), 47-68.

McGinty (1987) reported on a study he conducted using administrative policy students taking a capstone course in the School of Business at Eastern Washington University. A quasi-experimental design was used in this study. Since McGinty’s goal was to isolate the training being applied in order to determine the extent to which it influenced performance as measured by selected criteria such as knowledge of strategic management theory, ability to analyze financial data, or the ability to design strategic plans of action, he used a time series design, which called for a time series of periodic measurements and the introduction of some experimental change. His data analysis revealed a significant difference at the .004 level of significance between the control and experimental groups. Student responses to each part of the teacher evaluation forms were also significantly different between classes in both the evaluation of the subject matter and the evaluation of teacher effectiveness.

Ginn, P & Ginn, A. (1989). Tell the juggler: A gameshow metaphor for teaching the IBM-PC and its assembly language. The Journal of Suggestive-Accelerative Learning and Teaching, 14 (2), 143-156.

Ginn and Ginn (1989) created a game show metaphor for teaching the IBM-PC and its assembly language. Ginn stated that he had never seen as much cooperation among students as he had while teaching using this methodology. He also reported that while in the past, he would have five or six students drop the course within the first two weeks, there were virtually no drop-outs in the AL run class. Students’ grades in his conventionally taught class had always reflected the normal bell curve; whereas, in his AL taught class, all of the students made either As or Bs.

Prichard, A. (1986). A SALT pilot study: College developmental mathematics. The Journal for the Society of Accelerative Learning and Teaching, 11 (3), 167-175.

Prichard (1986) used several SALT variables (mind calming, relaxation, teacher verbal suggestions, unusually challenging assignments) as part of a Developmental Mathematics course, which is taught at Kennesaw College to prepare students whose math skills were rusty or undeveloped as a precursor to entry-level freshman math courses.

The final examination for both experimental and control classes was a department-wide, multiple-choice test. The experimental class had a mean score of 39.68 and the control class had a mean score of 34.38. A t-test of the significance of the difference yielded a t value that was significant at the .05 level.