Using Technology to Transform Instruction and Improve Learning in Introductory Psychology

讲授大学入门课程的讲课-考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，促进个人学习而不是合作学习，以牺牲长期学习为代价来实现短期保留。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的主动学习。万维网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。“在这门课程的两个课程中，有近200名学生接受了教育。学生满意度和学习的评价表明，学生赞赏的灵活性，在线格式，他们学到的东西一样多的学生教传统的讲课测试格式。 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，通过增加技术带来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彻底评估，以确定如何使用在线课程来改善对内容的即时和长期学习，并传播研究结果，使该课程成为社会和行为科学的国家模式。额外的实验室经验将创建在网络上交付，课程材料将在01年加强。在接下来的四个学期，课程组成部分将开发和评估，总是比较在线课程的传统讲座课程的并发版本。 该项目还将使用同一套原则和工具在教育学院开发四门基于网络的课程，使小学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步课程。 据推测，这将进一步提高未来的教师对教学方法的重要性，并学习如何评估什么是工作和不工作与他们的学生。 各种团体活动和不同的先进组织者将被评估。将评估学习风格和个性特征，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.