This study was conducted to examine the effects of instruction administered through written and visual symbol systems on the achievement, confidence, attitudes, time-on-task, and retention of formal and distance education students. The sample for the study consisted of 161 undergraduate students from formal and distance education settings.…

Teachers in a range of disciplines are interested in engaging their students in authentic activities that reflect the experiences of real-world practitioners. Adopting this approach requires the design and implementation of learning environments that incorporate and support such activities. This paper describes two real-life cases at the…

A perennial difficulty for first year students--one often viewed by them as an unimportant annoyance--is the need to handle sources and cite correctly. Any serious institutional attempt to address this issue in an interesting way is an enterprise concerned with motivation, as well as curriculum innovation. This paper reports on a collaboration…

"Looping" is an essentially simple concept: a teacher moves with his or her students to the next grade level, rather than sending them to another teacher at the end of the school year. This Digest explores the practitioners' perspectives on looping, the experience of European school systems, and research on looping. Practitioners report…

The guide is designed for teachers in adult basic education and General Educational Development classes, as an aid for identifying potential limited-English-proficient (LEP) students, assessing their English proficiency in all language skill areas, observing classroom behaviors that might impede comprehension, and planning appropriate instruction.…

This book helps teachers learn how to use and make educational media, covering traditional and new media such as computer laboratories, authentic assessment, theory bases, and hypermedia. Chapter topics progress from simple to complex. Each chapter includes clearly stated behavioral objectives that provide a study guide for students and can serve…

This paper describes a computer integration project implemented with two sixth-grade social studies classes. First it outlines and discusses the following goals: (1) integrate technology meaningfully into the classroom setting; (2) supplement the existing social studies curriculum; (3) enable students to learn to use computers responsibly; and (4)…

Besides a host of technical and logistical questions, more subtle issues, related to teachers' pedagogical visions and beliefs, as well as their perceived confidence for using technology, are also known to impede meaningful classroom technology use. Assuming that most designers and staff developers are fairly well prepared to provide technical…

The purpose of this study was to assist an instructor in facilitating an online course while the class was being offered, and to provide timely interventions for improving the course during the semester. A formative approach was used to help deal with unforeseen issues in implementing the first online course this instructor had offered. Through…

A computing literacy course at Michigan State University for non-computer science students was designed with a fixed course structure and continuously changing course content. The structure provides feedback for assessing students and revising content to meet the changing demands of client departments, changing student experience, and changing…

This curriculum module offers concrete and specific examples for instructors who wish to integrate the films of Yasujiro Ozu of Japan and Zhang Yimou from China into film studies courses. Through this module, students should learn to compare and contrast conventional screen space, color, and editing to alternative forms. By becoming more familiar…

This book examines an approach to teaching adults, in which teaching and learning are integrated and where the learning task is the overall design, incorporating the lecture or input along with practice. In 12 chapters, the book challenges the reader to describe the difference between teaching tasks and learning tasks and to examine both the…

This empirical study compared a graduate online course with an equivalent course taught in a traditional face-to-face format. Comparisons included student ratings of instructor and course quality; assessment of course interaction, structure, and support; and learning outcomes such as course grades and student self-assessment of ability to perform…

This paper argues that individual differences among undergraduate students are important factors to the effectiveness of asynchronous learning and that students' needs and perceptions must be taken into account in the design of Web-based instruction (WBI). A student typology is presented based on evidence from an ethnographic study of a WBI…

This document contains the following full and short papers on concepts and procedures from the SITE (Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education) 2002 conference: "Exploring Minds Network" (Marino C. Alvarez and others); "Learning Communities: A Kaleidoscope of Ecological Designs" (Alain Breuleux and others);…