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In traditional classrooms, students typically
have very little time to interact with materials, each other, or
the teacher. Moreover, students often must
wait days or weeks after handing in classroom work before receiving
feedback. In contrast, research suggests that learning proceeds
most rapidly when learners have frequent opportunities to apply
the ideas they are learning and when feedback on the success or
failure of an idea comes almost immediately.
Unlike other media, computer technology supports
this learning principle in at least three ways. First, computer
tools themselves can encourage rapid interaction and feedback. For
example, using interactive graphing, a student may explore the behavior
of a mathematical model very rapidly, getting a quicker feel for
the range of variation in the model. If the same student graphed
each parameter setting for the model by hand, it would take much
longer to explore the range of variation. Second, computer tools
can engage students for extended periods on their own or in small
groups; this can create more time for the teacher to give individual
feedback to particular children. Third,
in some situations, computer tools can be used to analyze each child’s
performance and provide more timely and targeted feedback than the
student typically receives.
Research indicates that computer applications
such as those described above can be effective tools to support
learning. One study compared two methods
of e-mailbased coaching. In the first method, tutors generated a
custom response for each student. In the second, tutors sent the
student an appropriate boilerplate response. Students’ learning improved significantly and approximately
equally using both methods, but the bolierplate-based coaching allowed
four times as many students to have access to a tutor.
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