Using Technology to Transform Instruction and Improve Learning in Introductory Psychology

大学入门课程的讲授测试法侧重于教师而不是学习者，鼓励被动学习而不是主动学习，促进个人学习而不是合作学习，以短期保留为目标，以长期学习为代价。心理学导论的另一种课程形式强调使用基于计算机的实验室和合作小组的主动学习。万维网被用来部署课程材料、实验室经验、信息检索和评估练习，以及“随时随地”的模拟测验。在这门课程的两次授课中，已经教授了近200名学生。对学生满意度和学习的评估表明，学生欣赏在线形式的灵活性，他们学到的东西与学生在传统的讲授考试形式下教的一样多。评估还揭示了课程中需要改进的部分。拟议项目的目的是提高小组协作互动的质量，通过增加利用技术进行主动学习的机会来增加学生的学习量，确定哪些学生最适合在线课程，对在线课程形式进行彻底评价，以确定如何利用在线课程形式来改进内容的即时和长期学习，并传播研究结果，使该课程可成为社会科学和行为科学的国家范本。将创造更多的实验经验，以便在网上提供，课程材料将在01年期间得到加强。在接下来的四个学期中，将开发和评估课程组成部分，始终将在线课程与传统授课课程的并行版本进行比较。该项目还将在教育学院开发四门基于网络的课程，使用相同的一套原则和工具，使基础教育专业的学生能够以这种形式参加数学教学和科学教学的初级课程。据推测，这将使未来的教师进一步认识到教学方法的重要性，并学习如何评估什么是有效的，而不是与他们的学生合作的。将对各种小组活动和不同的先进组织者进行评估。将对学习风格和个性特征进行评估，以确定从在线课程形式中受益最大的学生的特征。

The lecture-test method of teaching introductory college courses focuses on the teacher rather than the learner, encourages passive rather than active learning, promotes individual more than cooperative learning, and targets short-term retention at the expense of long-term learning. An alternative course format for Introduction to Psychology emphasizes active learning using computer-based laboratories and collaborative groups. The world-wide web is used to deploy course materials, laboratory experiences, information retrieval and evaluation exercises, and practice quizzes "any time, anywhere." Nearly 200 students have been taught during two offerings of this course. Evaluations of student satisfaction and learning showed that students appreciated the flexibility of the on-line format, and that they learned as much as students taught in the traditional lecture-test format. The evaluations also revealed those components of the course that need improvement. The proposed project aims to improve the quality of the collaborative group interactions, to increase the amount of student learning through increased opportunities for active learning enabled by technology, to identify those students for whom an on-line course is most appropriate, to conduct a thorough evaluation of the on-line course format to determine how it can be used to improve both immediate and long-term learning of content, and to disseminate the findings so that the course may serve as a national model for the social and behavioral sciences. Additional laboratory experiences will be created for delivery on the web, and course materials will be enhanced during Year 01. During the next four semesters, course components will be developed and evaluated, always comparing the on-line course to concurrent versions of conventional lecture courses. The project will also develop four Web based courses in the College of Education using the same set of principles and tools to allow elementary education majors to take initial courses in ma thematics teaching and science teaching in this format. It is hypothesized that this will further sensitize future teachers to the importance of teaching approaches and to learning how to assess what is working and not working with their students. Various group activities and different advanced organizers will be evaluated. Learning styles and personality traits will be assessed in order to determine the characteristics of those students who benefit most from the on-line course format.