Studying Educational Technology III

Introduction:The Writing Assignment

You may have noticed that an assignment for last Friday was to decide whether you would write about a piece of educational software or a research article (or two) relevent to your project this semester. Most people didn't notice it, I think, but in any case the assignment has changed a bit. I want each team to find at least two research articles they believe relevent to their project, to read them, and write a short discussion paper to be posted on the team's Project Page no later than Monday, April 7th. We'll spend some time today talking about how to go about searching out relevent and interesting articles.

"The Influence of Computer and Internet Use on Teachers' Pedagogical Practices and Perceptions," by Henry J. Becker and Jason Ravitz.

We'll finish our discussion of the ACOT study, Teaching with Technology and turn out attention to questions about what makes for a good and important research experiment/article/ finding in the field of educational technology (or in human-computer interaction generally).

We'll discuss the paper by Becker and Ravitz with some of these issues in mind, and try to build on the questions and comments stimulated by the paper. So, let's begin with some basic questions:

• How would you summarize the question motivating this paper and the "answer" to the question provided by the paper?
• What specific research questions do the authors ask and how do they go about answering them?
• What is the "data" of the paper?
• Are the measurements in this paper reliable, precise, accurate, and valid?
• What is the strongest/weakest aspect of this study?
• Does the study have any interesting policy implications for teacher education?
• What further studies would you do in order to test the validity of the conclusion(s)?
• How do the questions/methods/results of this paper compare with that of Peck, Cuban an Kirkpatrick (2002)?

For next time: We'll begin the Project Teams' storyboards on Wednesday, with the Bio80 team going first.