While we are in the middle of the Corona crisis, here is a quick update on the use of Cerego at Leiden….

In 2019, we started using Cerego at an Introductory Chemistry course – “General and Inorganic Chemistry”. While some of the 180 students registered for this class used the software package to memorize some definitions and names of complex ions, others did not. An extremely limited study on exam results showed no significant difference between students that did and did not use Cerego for exam questions that students could have prepared for using new Cerego content. Although this sounds disappointing, it is not! Exam results should not be influenced (much) by use of Cerego – it should only affect LONG TERM MEMORY, not the exam grade. As Cerego is not compulsory, the fact that it did not benefit Cerego users is, thus, a good thing!

At the start of 2000, Cerego was implemented at a course in the Medical Department on the anatomy on movement. Two student assistants created a large set of Cerego content based on high quality images of skeletal and muscular parts of the human body. In this class of over 300 students, about a third used Cerego regularly. From those, a significant subset was very enthousiastic and worked with the content passing the rather high retention level set at 3.0 for all content.

More recently,both the Biology and Computer Science departments hot interested in using Cerego. They are currently testing it for implementation in 2020 or 2021.

Finally, the BSc program in Archeology implemented Cerego. For the Material Science course, a large set of study materials were produced by the teachers and a student assistant. Approximately 70 students signed up for using Cerego. The course has just started.