Evaluation of two teaching programs based on structural learning principles

Abstract The work described here concerns the evaluation of two teaching programs in terms of their effectiveness with respect to overall learning gain, retention of the learned content and transfer to new subject areas. Two rather different theoretical frames have been used. One of the frames is the theory of structural learning which was mainly used to identify and formulate rules that underly a given subject matter and to propose differently structured teaching programs based upon different set of rules. The deterministic aspects of behavior often connected with structural learning theory, as for instance in the work of SCANDURA, is not considered here. The other frame is the probabilistic measurement theory of RASCH. Measurement models derived from this theory were used to define and measure the learning effects envisaged.