A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

3.2.1.6 Scoring system
Correct recall of the aliens’ eye colour was allocated a score of one or if
‘incorrect’ given zero. The correct recall of alien skills (associative word
meanings) was also given a score of one. However, where the skill consisted of
two or more words and only one of the target words was recalled they were
allocated a score of 0.5 and no response or incorrect answer received zero. The
scoring system for the acquisition of the novel words was more complex. A
novel word was considered to be learned if the spoken and/ or written recall
contained greater than 50% of the target phonemes / graphemes, plus, greater
than 50% of these phonemes / graphemes in the correct order. This system
aimed to reduce the number of responses with randomly assigned phonemes or
letters being correct through chance alone.
By their nature multiple-choice assessment tasks contain an element of chance,
which makes it difficult to evaluate if a participant’s score represented this
chance element or was a reflection of their ability to learn the stimuli. It was
therefore decided that target items would be considered learned if participants
demonstrated through other assessment tasks that they knew the items in
question and also observation of participant indication of their knowledge of the
target or if they were merely guessing.
3.2.2 Results
3.2.2.1 Immediate recall
Table 3.1 presents the total raw recall scores (spoken and written) for the name
and skill of the aliens for both male and female participants. The scores identify
a large range of performance indicating variability in the ability of healthy adults
to learn new words (ranging from 0 to 9 new word forms and 2 -10 associative
meanings learned each from a maximum potential of 10). When recalling the
names and skills many of the participants listed them randomly, rather than
linking the word forms and associative meanings together. It was felt that the
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