This study was undertaken to determine the effectiveness of four selected instructional treatments measured by judges' ratings of subjects' performance on four selected manipulative tasks. The study focused on comparing self-instruction, lecture-demonstration (classroom), lecture-demonstration (television), and noinstruction methods of teaching manipulative activities.The major hypotheses to be tested were:1. There are no differences in quality of performance of groups taught by selfinstruction, lecture-demonstration (classroom), lecture-demonstration (television), and no-instruction methods of teaching manipulative activities.
2.There are no differences in time required to perform manipulative tasks taught by these four instructional treatments.A four-by-four counterbalanced Latin square design involving randomly assigned Groups, Tasks, and Treatments, was assigned to sixteen cells. The selection of the Latin square design eliminated some of the common variables and criticisms of classroom experimentation (teacher's experience, students'.ability,, matched groups). Self-instruction (A), lecture-demonstration-classroom (B), lecture-demonstration-television (C), and no-instruction (D), constituted the four instructional and treatment groups selected from a population of college juniors and seniors.The four manipulative tasks were Skekhing, Desk Blotter Construction, Block Printing, and Solid Block Construction. The four tasks were selected because they were unrelated in the tools, materials, and processes required to complete each task. However, these tasks represent a crosssection of the activities common to an instructional materials course for the t,raining of elementary school teachers. Each group completed each task by one of ,the four instructional treatments.Subjects were selected from students enrolled in education courses in the School of Education at the University of Connecticut. Two groups, A and C, were intact classes, while groups B and D were comprised of subjects randomly assigned to these groups, from four different, education courses. All subjects were students in their junior or senior year at the University of Connixticut.Subjects were taught procedural steps in completing the assigned manipulative tasks by one of the four instructional treatments. Subjects learning a manipulative task by self-instruction and noinstruction were given no verbal procedural instructions. However, the self-ins.truction treatment group was given written procedural steps on how to perform an assigned task. The no-instruction group performed the manipulative task by a trial-and-error procedure, receiving no verbal or written procedural instructions other than a problem sheet and/or a working drawing.Subjects taught by the lecture-demonstration classroom and television versicns received twenty to twenty-five minutes of instruction on the assigned manipulative tasks. The .verbal lessons were based upon the same illustrations and procedural steps described in the self-instruction materials. Teachers were not allowed to as...