In recent years there has been increasing interest in the phenomena of "gaming the system," where a learner attempts to succeed in an educational environment by exploiting properties of the system's help and feedback rather than by attempting to learn the material. Developing environments that respond constructively and effectively to…

Capabilities and biases of learning technologies are examined in light of four widely accepted principles: deep content knowledge, dialogue, agency, and collaboration. Software that supports these principles must focus students' attention on ideas rather than topics or tasks and should foster high levels of "epistemic agency," providing students…

Simulation-based educational products are excellent set of illustrative tools that proffer features like visualization of the dynamic behavior of a real system, etc. Such products have great efficacy in education and are known to be one of the first-rate student centered learning methodologies. These products allow students to practice skills such…

Providing detailed, constructive and helpful feedback is an important contribution to effective student learning. Quality assurance is also required to ensure consistency across all students and reduce error rates. However, with increasing workloads and student numbers these goals are becoming more difficult to achieve. An automated feedback…

A framework is proposed for the formative evaluation of multimedia. It describes techniques that have worked well in the evaluation of software development and gives examples of the use of evaluation results. The focus is primarily on the degree to which the instructional multimedia program supports the user's activities and tasks in the user's…

This manual is designed to help classroom teachers in Alberta, Canada implement the Junior High Computer Studies Program. The first eight sections cover the following material: (1) introduction to the teacher resource manual; (2) program rationale and philosophy; (3) general learner expectations; (4) program framework and flexibility; (5) program…

Recent research has demonstrated the promise of graphing software as an aid to teaching graphs in two content areas: line graphs of aspects of motion and graphs of algebraic functions. This study attempted to generalize the idea of computer-assisted graphing to include the use of several kinds of graphs to solve a wider range of problems. A unit…

This book is organized in three major sections. The first section provides 15 lesson plans for the integration of activities involving computer uses in mathematics instruction. Each lesson plan includes grade level, objective, time, materials, important terms, background, suggestions, and activities. The second section provides a list of available…

Almost overnight, the World Wide Web has made the solution of "classic" information retrieval problems a pressing commercial goal. The various information retrieval solutions being offered on the Web are quite familiar to the librarian. The various Web search sites make use of "traditional" inverted indexes, manual indexing,…

This document is a report of a two-year effort by Duke University Press to make National Collegiate Software (NCS), a clearinghouse for faculty-authored liberal arts software for classroom use, a viable, scholastically respectable, self-supporting operation. NCS initially had been operated by North Carolina State University. When Duke University…

ERes, an electronic reserve system, allows faculty and staff to make documents available on the World Wide Web without requiring any technical skills. The system was developed at Santa Clara University (California). This paper provides an overview of ERes and includes: technical information; the user interface for entering and viewing documents;…

In school districts throughout the country, computer literacy is considered a top educational goal, however, too few administrators, teachers, and parents understand what the term really means. The computer plays two roles in schools: information resource--as a complement to books, magazines, video, and other media; and self-contained teaching…

Interactive multimedia (IMM) is a technology with the potential to change the way people learn, acquire information, and entertain themselves. This technology brings together a range of fields and requires the skills of professionals from those fields. This handbook offers practical advice on issues related to developing successful interactive…

This collection of materials describes different types of computer applications and software that can help students with disabilities. It contains information on: (1) Easy Access, a feature of the systems software on every Macintosh computer that allows use of the keypad instead of the mouse, options for slow keys, and options for sticky keys; (2)…

In order to provide teachers and students with electronic learning environments that support mentoring and collaboration through electronic means, the authors developed software that supports same time/different place educational collaborative activities over the Internet. These activities focus on teaching students how to organize and systematize…