Research on Teaching with Technology
In addition to keeping abreast of the general landscape of educational technology, the Office of Technology for Education (OTE) conducts primary research in terms of assessment and evaluation studies, and secondary research in the form of Teaching With Technology White Papers.
Despite the growing popularity of laptop programs, there have been very few systematic or behavioral studies examining how students use laptops to support their learning or how the multiple uses of laptops affect the work and lives of students. In this study we use multiple methods to systematically investigate how the availability of laptops affects the culture of the classroom, the process and quality of students work, student engagement in their work, and how laptops affect the social interactions of students.
Teaching With Technology White Papers
The purpose of the Teaching With Technology White Paper series is to provide Carnegie Mellon faculty and staff access to high-quality, research-based information with regard to a given classroom technology. These papers offer a general overview of the technology topic, summarize findings from available assessments and evaluations, and give direction toward further reading and online resources.
This series does not introduce original research findings from technology assessments or evaluations conducted at the Office of Technology for Education and/or Carnegie Mellon University. The papers serve as literature reviews, intended to provide scholarly integration and synthesis of the most sound and comprehensive studies documented at the time of publication.
How to foster meaningful engagement among students is a long-standing question in large lecture halls. In effort to address this issue, electronic classroom response systems (CRS) have been tested and used in higher education classrooms since the 1960’s.
The studies summarized in this paper show that CRS can facilitate the process of drawing out students’ prior knowledge, maintaining student attention, and creating opportunities for meaningful engagement. They can also assist instructors in assessing student comprehension and developing classroom activities that allow for the application of key concepts to practical problems.
Sharing audio and video files on the Web has been possible for most of the last decade. Why, then, in the past two years has podcasting exploded onto the scene and become such a hot topic in educational technology?
How does this new technology and its widespread adoption create new opportunities in education? Is it just a passing trend, or is there genuine potential to improve the quality of the educational experience and learning outcomes?
The Podcasting paper attempts to answer these questions through the exploration of educational podcasting in three realms: the creation and distribution of lecture archives for review, the delivery of supplemental educational materials and content, and assignments requiring students to produce and submit their own podcasts.
The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of lecture webcasting, and to summarize findings from several formal evaluations of the technology. We focus on questions of attendance, learning outcomes, student behavior with regard to access of archived webcasts, and effects on instructor behavior and quality of teaching.
Studies indicate that the use of lecture webcasting for the purposes of archive and review is pedagogically neutral. While lecture webcasts do not affect student performance, there is some evidence that their availability improves the student's educational experience by reducing stress and providing an additional study resource.
To improve learning outcomes, instructors must think creatively about using webcasting technology to free up valuable classroom time for more interactive discussions and activities.
