Website and Study review assignment:
For this assignment, we were asked to provide our reaction to a website and a study report that we were provided links to.
The website was from Carnegie Mellon University entitled Principles of Teaching and Learning (http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/principles/index.html). This website provided some interesting ideas on what attirbutes can affect students' learning abilities. I liked the discussion on this site, especially the items about students' prior knowledge, motivations and organizational abilities. The discussion on effective teaching principles was also interesting. I really liked the discussion on the interplay between learning objectives, assessments and instructional activities and how their alignment affects the quality/effectiveness of classroom instruction.
The study review that we read is A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of teaching and learning http://www.ncrel.org/tech/effects2/waxman.pdf. This study, conducted in 2003, updates the data of previous studies on the subject of measuring the effectiveness of technology implementation on various aspects of students' results. The majority of the prior results (mainly from the early 90s up through 2001) showed that the introduction of technology had a significant effect on students' engagement in and retention of the material being covered.This study set out of update the results due to the proliferation of online resources specifically designed for classroom implementation as well as due to the fact that children are becoming more tech-savvy at a much younger age these days.
I also liked the first selection, Principles of Teaching and Learning. I thought it had a lot of wonderful insights as to charcteristics that impact learning from both the student and teacher roles. This will be a good one for you to keep handy when you begin your journey as a classroom teacher--if that is where you are headed!
ReplyDeleteAS with you and Sue, I really enjoyed the first article. I found it to be very true, insightful, and something I could relate to. Like Sue said, I would like to keep this as a resource for the future. When reading your response, I see that you seemed to have gotten more than I did out of the second article. I enjoyed reading your response and it helped inspired me to go back and look at it again to see if there was something more that I missed.
ReplyDeleteWilliam---
ReplyDeleteI also thought that the incorporation of prior knowledge was interesting in terms of helping/hindering learning development. It's often hard to "unlearn" misconceptions, but at the same time having a healthy prior understanding of a topic can certainly trigger interest and retention. As far as the second article is concerned, I agree that it pointed out the significance of introducing technology to children at a young age. However, as you pointed out, children are immersed in technology from a very young age, almost as a necessity of our society.