A survey of Psychology students's perception of WebCT

These pages present the results of a questionnaire submitted to first year Psychology students to enquire about their perception of webCT (introduced this year in our department to support our Psychology 1 course) as well as their learning styles. This survey has been prepared by two fourth year students in Psychology, Louisa Young and Katie sinclair.

The results are still provisional, based on 71 questionnaires correctly filled (we had about 120 respondants but some of them stopped filling the questionnaire half way through and others omitted to answer some questions).

All data are summarized using the format below.


1. In this course WebCT has allowed me to cover the course content in more detail



The graph on the left present the distribution of responses (frequency count) among the respondants. The graphs on the right present the distribution of responses (probability) for the same data divided in different categories (with the number of respondants per category in between parentheses).

  1. Sex: Male (23), Female (48)

  2. Prior experience with web-based learning technologies: Yes (12), No (55).
    Exact wording: "Is this your first time using educational technology for instruction?"

  3. Years of experience: 0-1 year (22), 2-5 years (26), more than 5 years (23).
    Exact wording: "If no, how many years have you been using educational technology for instruction?"

  4. Their perception of themselves as a rather successful or unsuccessful students: Quite well ++ (15), Quite well + (21), About average (23), Not so well - (8)
    Exact wording: "How well do you think you have been doing in your assessed work overall, so far? Please rate yourself objectively, based on the marks you have been obtaining."
    Note: The scale we used had 9 levels, with the following options "Very Well (++ or +) / Quite Well (++ or +) / About Average / Not so Well (- or --) / Rather Badly (- or --)". However, only four categories are listed as most students used only the central values. The left out categories counted a very small number of students: "Rather badly --" (1), "Rather badly -" (1), "Not, so well --" (0), "Very Well +" (0), "Very Well++" (0).

Note that we have tried to provide intuitive colour codings to ease the interpretation of the graphs. Blue vs Rose for Males and Females. A level of blueness for experience (lighter blue = less experienced). A level of greyness for years of experience (going to white = more experienced, by analogy to hair colour). A range from red to green for perception as successful student (red for doing not so well, vivid green for doing quite well, really).

Let me see these data



These graphs & html pages have been automatically produced with R, an open source software for statistical analyses and graphics. It's available on all major platforms. If you would like the source files I used, contact me: M.Lange (at) ed.ac.uk