Draft -6 May 25, 2002 Chapter under review for a book by M. Birnbaum (Ed.), “Psychological Experiments on the Internet”, Academic Press http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/book/IntroWeb.htm WHAT ARE COMPUTING EXPERIENCES GOOD FOR: A CASE STUDY IN ON-LINE RESEARCH John H. Mueller, D. Michele Jacobsen, University of Calgary, and Ralf Schwarzer, Freie University of Berlin ABSTRACT The argument has been made that discovery-based experiences in learning to program in LOGO on computers reduce mathematics anxiety. Broadening this perspective, we speculated that the result should be a decrease in test anxiety and an increase in self- confidence, with enhanced general academic performance, not just mathematics performance. Further, we hypothesized that this benefit would not be limited to the LOGO language, rather it should be a general by-product of self-instruction (discovery) experiences with computers in general. We developed an on-line survey to explore this possibility. This chapter will summarize some of the results of this survey and our experiences with on-line data collection. Address all correspondence to : John Mueller EDPS Department University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4 Canada mueller@ucalgary.ca http://mueller.educ.ucalgary.ca/ 403-220-5664 (work) 403-288-7342 (home) 403-282-9244 (fax)