Cognitive theorists believe that students should be active in organizing their learning. Thus learner control may assist learning directly and promote good strategies.
A teaching programme is described that offers to the student control over content, style and level of difficulty. The material was delivered by PET microcomputer and the subject was binary arithmetic. Four groups of young secondary schoolchildren were exposed to different treatments of the same material.
The treatments were:
learner control;
learner control with advice;
random program control;
adaptive program control.
The effect of advice on pupil's choices was clearly evident. The random group performed less well than the other groups but no differences were observed between learner and adaptive control.
An increasing proportion of education and training will require learners to make decisions about their own learning. One way in which schoolchildren can be prepared for this is by experience with computer programs which allow learner control. A term‐long trial was conducted with 14–15 year old schoolchildren learning mathematics from such programs. The choices adopted by these pupils are studied and some results are reported. We introduce two measures that may allow a characterization of choices made by individual pupils.
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