Speaking of teaching in the technology-mediated setting, I
agree with John Keller (1999) that it is more challenging for teachers to teach
in the technology-based instruction era than in the traditional classroom. It
is true that in the technology-mediated setting, it is convenient for students
to keep up with their work and study at their own pace (in case of no technological
problems) but how can we motivate them to be a self-directed learner? A
guidance teacher and I once did a trial lesson using Facebook as a media of
teaching Careers in grade 7. At first students seemed excited that they could
use Facebook to post their work and to interact with teachers and friends on
this online open space. The group posted the information about their careers of
interest on Facebook on the week assigned. The information was on Facebook
every week as scheduled but the amount of discussion was very low. I didn’t
think it was a technological problem or accessibility because we did ask the
students before. Every one could access the internet from home and knew how to
operate Facebook. And we tried to apply all instructional strategies in the
lesson. Somehow, after reading the research “The Effects of Technology-Mediated
Instructional Strategies on Motivation, Performance, and Self-Directed
Learning” by Donna M. Gabrielle, I think that my instruction can be improved by
adding motivational strategies.
Next point from the reading to my experience is about
expectancy. One day when I talked with two senior high students, they mentioned
about one math teacher. They told me that the teacher always began the lessons
with very difficult questions. They felt like they did not want to continue
studying anymore. At that time I thought that the teacher may have wanted to
draw students’ attention by giving challenging problems. However, after coming
across the reading about expectancy-value model, this instructional strategy
can cause the opposite result. From experiencing the difficult questions at the
beginning of class, it can cause anxiety and fear in students. Students’
self-perception of competence drops and it will affect their achievement
behavior. In this case, it can be worse if the teacher does not present any
value of the lesson to students.
In some cases where students don’t see value in the content
of the subject, we can motivate them in terms of skills to be gained from
studying this subject. For example, some high school students don’t pay
attention to math class, because they will not use it for their university
entrance exam and will not study mathematics in the university level. They
prefer to study in the School of Arts or Languages which mathematics course is
not required. Motivation enhancement can be telling them about critical
thinking skills and problem-solving skills they will gain from studying
mathematics. These skills can be applied to many situations in their life. I
think this will help increase their perception of values in learning mathematics
to some point.
It is interesting to me that from some researches (e.g.
Eccles, 1993; Eccles et 1998), students’ perception of competence dropped
greatly when they are crossing from primary to junior high school. This reminds me of phone calls from parents
every year about their kids who just start their first year in junior high. The
parents are worried about their kids’ study and the decline of grades. Even the
students themselves ask me why their grades decrease from when they were in
primary. Some kids also develop some negative study habits when they grow up.
Perception of competence might play an important role on these cases and then
it is worth to do further research in my school context. If the result repeats
other researches, the school can find the way to increase students’ perception
of their competence and we can see subsequent students’ achievement.
References:
Pintrich, P.R. & Schunk, D.H. (2002). Motivation in education: Theory, research, and applications (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Merrill.
Donna M. Gabrielle. The Effects of Technology-Mediated Strategies on Motivation, Performance and Self-Directed Learning. Florida, USA.
Hi Ornisa,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your efforts. Generally speaking, changing the strategies of instruction will strengthen learner's attention, but the challenges are: How can one maintain this attention? As you said in your post that students were excited at the beginning to use Facebook to accomplish their assignments or tasks. The best way to increase the discussion among the students is to divide them into groups and assign for each one task. This will be beneficial for collaborative work and peer learning. My colleagues are using Facebook to teach their courses by using Facebook. They created for each course, a group and a You Tube channel to post their video files to review by their students. Instructors' roles on Facebook are to provide the students with positive feedback. Lack of discussion on Facebook may be due to learners' expectations from using Facebook.Therefore; in such a situation, we need to get more information about their expectations and then design our instruction to fit their needs and desires.
Hello Ornisa,
DeleteI like your example of students using facebook. One interesting thing about using media today is how instructors attempt to incorporate spaces like facebook. I suspect one issue can be that they attempt to use it in a manner that …. Doesn’t fit with the students schema of FB. But another issue could be their motivation to use it for this particular instructional purpose. So they are motivated to use FB (at the youth center where I volunteer the kids will sit on FB for hours if you let them), but I suspect they see its purpose as social, not instructional. So, as Zuheir mentions, you would need to determine what activities they would most likely use FB for.
But going back to your opening comment about how it is more challenging to teach technology-based instruction versus classroom instruction. My question would be, why do people think this is the case? And will this perception change over time? What are the attributes of each that makes one more challenging than the other, and which can be done to mitigate those challenges?