Using Technology to Transform Instruction and Improve Learning in Introductory Psychology

教授大学入门课程的讲授-测试方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，鼓励个人学习而不是合作学习，以短期记忆为目标而牺牲长期学习。《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协作小组进行主动学习。世界范围的网络被用来“随时随地”部署课程材料、实验室经验、信息检索和评估练习以及练习测验。近200名学生在这门课程的两期课程中被教导。对学生满意度和学习情况的评估表明，学生们很欣赏在线教学模式的灵活性，他们学到的东西与传统的讲授-测试模式的学生一样多。评价还揭示了课程中需要改进的部分。拟议的项目旨在提高协作小组互动的质量，通过增加技术提供的主动学习机会来增加学生的学习量，确定最适合在线课程的学生，对在线课程格式进行全面评估，以确定如何使用它来改善即时和长期的学习内容。并传播这些发现，使这门课程成为社会和行为科学的全国典范。在第01学年，我们将创建更多的实验室体验，以便在网络上发布，课程材料也将得到加强。在接下来的四个学期中，课程组成部分将被开发和评估，总是将在线课程与传统讲座课程的同步版本进行比较。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，使小学教育专业的学生能够以这种形式学习数学和科学教学的初级课程。据推测，这将进一步使未来的教师对教学方法的重要性更加敏感，并学会如何评估哪些对学生有效，哪些对学生无效。各种小组活动和不同的先进组织者将进行评估。学习风格和个性特征将被评估，以确定那些从在线课程中受益最多的学生的特征。

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.