Learner control in computer‐assisted learning*

Abstract

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.

Ecological effects of changes in fire regimes in Pinus ponderosa ecosystems in the Colorado Front Range

“…Cores that missed the pith by more than 20 years were not used. To date establishment and mortality of dead trees, samples were quantitatively cross-dated using the program COFECHA (Holmes 1983). Partial cross-sections from fire scars were initially crossdated using marker rings, and when necessary were also measured and quantitatively cross-dated with COFECHA (see Sherriff 2004 for details).…”

Control and Interaction in Computerized Simulations

“…This view is partially supported by Moore (1985), who argues that ... the learning environment in which ... microcomputer activity takes place ... plays a decisive role in attitude formation. Although Holmes et al (1985) in their study of learner &dquo;display control&dquo; (see Merrill, 1981) in CAL packages did &dquo;not reveal any immediate, discemable learning improvements from learner control over ... computer control,&dquo; this still concerns control of the computer, not of the social context. Emphasis is also placed on participant control over simulation events.…”

View Entire Issue

“…One interesting question for further research would be to introduce the issue of advisement, giving learners meaningful information regarding their learning development while they are performing a task, in order to see if learners need information about the progress of their learning in order to effectively utilize the control they are provided with (Holmes et al, 1985;Tennyson, 1980;Johansen & Tennyson, 19^3;Tennyson & Buttrey, 1980). These researchers feel that simply providing control to the learner is not sufficient because learners often terminate the instruction too early, and make poor decisions.…”

“…Still other experiments found that providing learners with control had no effect on performance (Alpert & Bitzer, 1959;Judd, 1972;Merrill et al, 1980;Goetzfried & Hannafin, 1985;Holmes et al, 1985;Reinking, 1988).…”