Problems with evaluation of courseware for instruction in psychology

Recent trends in courseware evaluation have stressed the importance of program characteristics ancillary to the learning process, such as the use of menus. Although attention to these aspects of programming may improve the appearance and ease of use of software, the primary consideration in the selection of instructional software is whether it can provide instructional content to the students who use it. This can best be determined by the instructor alone, who may often find it necessary to write programs to suit specific instructional needs. Such programs are in wide use and are often better than commercially available sets designed by professionals.     

Software review

Summary Word Works certainly provides a technological approach to creating educational worksheets. These programs ar designed to enhance instructional management and increase student vocabulary efficiently. Educators with at least word processing capability are able to operate this menudriven program.Given that the appropriateness of instructional worksheets is often bantered about the educational community, the contributions of these programs are somewhat limited. Although it is assumed by the software manufacturers that programs as such are motivating for students, the extended use of such activities are often criticized by educational experts. Further, the on-going use of worksheets is tempered by such student variables as student reading ability, students' age-grade level, and other variables.     

Instructional programs for psychology: A review and analysis

This paper presents 10 general observations about current software for instruction in psychology and examines selected examples employing four instructional techniques for computer-assisted instruction. We find that although the number of programs employing experimental or data-oriented approaches to psychology as a primary vehicle of instruction is increasing, tutorial drill and practice programs and gaming are not well represented.     

The computer as a tool in instructional computing: Students as software architects

The computer-rich environment that exists when every student has a computer provides a variety of new opportunities for instructional use of computers, including new opportunities for the use of microcomputer application programs. After arguing that computer programming has a limited role in instructional computing, this paper describes the assumptions, development, and structure of a psychology course in which students make use of the microcomputer and its application programs as a tool in software design. However, programming is not required. Rather, the personal computer and its application programs provide an environment in which the student has the freedom to develop software design and explore course content without being constrained by the mind-numbing minutiae involved in programming a rigid, inflexible tutee.     

An interactive data-generating and answer-correcting system for problems in statistics

A computer-assisted instructional system is described which provides the student with extensive drill and feedback in the application of statistical methods to computer-simulated data. The system consists of three interactive programs that perform the following functions: (1) FILEMAKE creates “source” data for problems in statistics having whatever population characteristics are desired by the instructor; (2) DATASET generates unique data for each student by performing a random modification, based on sampling theory, of the source data; and (3) CORRECT corrects each student’s unique answers to the problem.     

Teaching psychology as a laboratory science in the age of the Internet

For over 30 years, psychologists have relied on computers to teach experimental psychology. With the advent of experiment generators, students can create well-designed experiments and can test sophisticated hypotheses from the start of their undergraduate training. Characteristics of new Net-based experiment generators are discussed and compared with traditional stand-alone generators. A call is made to formally evaluate the instructional effectiveness of the wide range of experiment generators now available. Specifically, software should be evaluated in terms of known learning outcomes, using appropriate control groups. The many inherent differences between any two software programs should be made clear. The teacher’s instructional method should be fully described and held constant between comparisons. Finally, the often complex interaction between the teacher’s instructional method and the pedagogical details of the software must be considered.     

A meta-analytic comparison of the effectiveness of smoking cessation methods.

Meta-analysis was used to cumulate the results from 633 studies of smoking cessation, involving 71,806 subjects, that reported the proportion of successful quits. Self-care methods do not appear to be as effective as formal intervention methods. Instructional programs involving physicians were not more effective than other instructional programs. Conditioning-based techniques such as aversive methods had success rates similar to those of instructional methods, and among the instructional methods, those incorporating social norms and values were more successful than those relying solely on didactic approaches. Cumulation of quit rates from all available control groups indicated that, on average, 6.4% of the smokers could be expected to quit smoking without any intervention. This figure must be subtracted from the raw success rate to obtain the net success rate for each program. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Strategies for instructional computing

Instructional computing in psychology has become increasingly important to undergraduate and graduate curricula. Four modes of instructional computing, drill and practice, data generators, experiment simulators, and gaming, are described and illustrated with actual programs. Implications of recent developments in cognitive psychology for instructional computing are outlined. Factors in the design of high-quality materials are described, and problems and opportunities for publication and distribution are discussed.     

A lexicographic combination model of decision making by superintendents among multiattribute instructional program alternatives

The decision-making process of 16 superintendents in choosing among alternative instructional programs for elementary level grades was studied. The additive and lexicographic combination models of decision making were investigated for consistency with the process used by the Ss in ranking 27 alternative instructional programs. The programs were formed from all possible combinations of three different results on each of three attributes. The attributes were (1) program cost per pupil, (2) reading achievement gain in grade units, and (3) arithmetic achievement gain in grade units. Fifteen Ss performed with five or fewer pairwise reversals from the lexicographic model. The lexicographic model was accepted as most consistent with the decision-making process.     

Selection of software in the instructional laboratory

In this paper, I discuss a number of issues concerning software selection in instructional laboratories. First, I describe several taxonomies of instructional software and argue that the most important dimension of instructional software is that it must be an efficient tool. Second, I discuss some elements of the context of the instructional lab, including sophistication of users. Third, I explore design features, especially those related to ease of learning to use packages. Several other issues are also considered, such as where to find software reviews.     

Verbal and visual instruction with mental retardation: The role of subject characteristics and task factors

Past research and theory presents an inconsistent picture concerning the relative value of verbal versus visual instructional programs for individuals with mental retardation. From an empirical perspective, there is evidence that this inconsistency may be due to the differences in the type of tasks and the specific abilities of the subjects employed across studies. In this research, the effects of three instructional procedures (verbal, visual, and verbal plus visual) were evaluated with mentally retarded persons who varied in verbal and visual ability. Performance was examined on a visual task which incorporated stimuli of varying degrees of familiarity to the subjects. The results indicated that the use of the combined verbal-visual instruction procedure was more effective than the other two training programs when task stimuli were familiar to the subjects. When task stimuli were unfamiliar, instructional procedures which had a visual component were found to be superior to a procedure which employed only the use of verbal component. The subjects' visual ability was most strongly associated with performance outcome when visual instruction was employed and unfamiliar task stimuli were sorted. In contrast, subjects' verbal ability appeared to be equally important across instructional and task conditions. The implications of the results for the design of instructional programs and for future research are discussed.     

Designing courseware: Prompts from behavioral instruction

Behavior analysis has been at the forefront of instructional design for many years. However, this leadership position is rapidly eroding as teachers, trainers and other educators insist that behavioral instruction is good only for meeting simplistic educational goals. I argue that in order for behavior analysis to continue to influence the field of instructional design, behavior analysts need to help people develop instructional programs that use advanced interactive computer systems and that are based on all the components of behavioral instruction. Therefore, this paper suggests the following strategy. First, it teaches people to select authoring systems that will enable them to design interactive computer programs. Second, in order to improve current authoring systems it provides a set of prompts that integrate the features of behavioral instruction. I claim that the integration of these prompts with an advanced authoring system will facilitate the development of complex, conceptual learning programs and minimize current criticisms of behavioral instruction.     

Learning Strategies and Transfer in the Domain of Programming

We report two studies involving an intelligent tutoring system for Lisp (the Camegie Mellon University Lisp Tutor). In Experiment 1, we developed a model, based on production system theories of transfer and analogical problem solving, that accounts for effects of instructional examples, the transfer of cognitive skills across programming problems, and practice effects. In Experiment 2, we analyzed protocols collected from subjects as they processed instructional texts and examples before working with the Lisp Tutor and protocols collected after subjects solved each programming problem. The results suggest that the acquisition of cognitive skills is facilitated by high degrees of metacognition, which includes higher degrees of monitoring states of knowledge, more self-generated explanation goals and strategies, and greater attention to the instructional structure. Improvement in skill acquisition is also strongly related to the generation of explanations connecting the example material to the abstract terms introduced in the text, the generation of explanations that focus on the novel concepts, and spending more time in planning diminishing returns. Finally, reflection on problem solutions that focus on understanding the abstractions underlying programs or that focus on understanding how programs work seems to be related to improved learning.     

Some observations on applications of microcomputers in teaching

Several useful and important observations appear in the papers in this symposium. This paper highlights some of those ideas and some of the underlying themes of the symposium papers. Finally, focusing on some of the problems of either selecting software or developing software, the paper suggests that the fundamental problems associated with developing a computer-based instructional laboratory are the same as those associated with developing any instructional laboratory: setting one’s instructional goals and then integrating the equipment and procedures into the instructional context.     

Data generation and analysis using spreadsheets

Modern spreadsheets are powerful and useful tools that can often replace special-purpose programs for generating data and for student analysis of simple statistical problems. The inherent flexibility of spreadsheets makes them especially convenient and extensible. Several templates for generating and analyzing data fort tests and analysis of variance are discussed. Users can specify then, \(\bar X\) , andSD of two or more groups and then execute macros that generate appropriate data. Overwriting the generated data with “real” values turns the spreadsheet into a data analysis program. Spreadsheets hold promise as valuable instructional supplements for simple designs, but they are less suitable for more complex designs, where special-purpose programs may be more appropriate.     

Performance of Fourth-Grade Students with Learning Disabilities on Multiplication Facts Comparing Teacher-Mediated and Technology-Mediated Interventions: A Preliminary Investigation

Instructional applications (apps) are educational software programs that can be accessed via mobile technologies (e.g., iPad, smartphone) and used to help students acquire various academic skills, including mathematics. Although research suggests that app-based instruction (AI) can be effective, there is a paucity of research comparing AI, to teacher-directed instruction (TDI) or to a combination of instructional approaches (CI) involving both AI and TDI in tandem. In an alternating treatments design, we compared AI, TDI, and CI conditions during instruction targeting multiplication facts with six students with learning disabilities. Results were inconsistent across students, and no condition emerged as consistently better than the others. Students completed social validity rating scales, and all approaches were favored by at least one student. Our results support findings from previous research involving similar comparisons between these instructional formats in which no (or minimal) differences across conditions were detected. We conclude that there may not be a meaningful difference between the outcomes achieved using AI, TDI, or CI for many students. Results are discussed in terms of directions for the future research.     

Computer-based systems for applying psychological knowledge

Computer-based systems have long been seen as a means for applying psychological knowledge to instructing. However, from many years of research and development on instructional design and on using computers for instructing, we learned that the current instructional techniques are based on an inadequate scientific knowledge base and are poorly implemented. In order to do better, improved techniques based on modern cognitive science must be developed, and computer-based aids are needed to assist their application. Furthermore, a standardization and distribution system is needed to identify effective instructional programs and make them available. This seems especially important if we hope to have broad impact on education and training.     

Ethics Education: Recommendations for an Evolving Discipline

This article describes results of a national questionnaire completed by counselor education program professors regarding their teaching of ethics. The questionnaire asked professors about 5 aspects of ethics education: materials used, instructional methods used, content taught, methods of evaluation used, and professors' goals for the ethics education of their students. Questionnaire results and demographic data about professors and programs are used to describe perceptions and practices of counselor educators who teach ethics.     

Open-source software to conduct online rating studies

Several software programs exist to assist researchers in setting up online questionnaires. Existing tools are of little help for delivering online rating studies, for which it is often desirable to collect data from participants for only a subset of a stimulus set. OR-Vis enables researchers to quickly set up online rating studies by supplying the set of items to be rated, the number of stimuli an individual participant responds to, the number of participants an item is shown to, and the rating questions. The software then generates and delivers unique questionnaires for each participant, while managing the data collection process. The present article describes OR-Vis, its installation process, and how to use it to gather data. OR-Vis is open-source software and can be downloaded from www.orvis.uni-muenster.de.