Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Behaviorism in Practice
The video by Dr. Orey brought up a great point that I had not yet thought of before; he says that technology is a great tool but if used in the wrong way it can be damaging to the students. In his example about how the low achieving students were being shown tutorials to improve their test score broke my heart. Luckily my school does not take it to that level. Technology is such a great tool and it needs to be used in the proper way. If a new tool is present the tool needs to be taught to the student as well as followed up with some activity to see if they understand the tool that was presented to them. I think the behaviorist theory is a great theory but I also think that it should not be the only tool used in the classroom. I do not think that any teacher lives by on theory and only uses that theory, if they did then their students are missing out on a lot of great things that education can give them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Great thinking! I was also saddened by reading about low achieving students and the online tutorials. I teach in a school where we have low achieving students, we didn't meet AYP and we still believe that face time with a teacher is what they need more of. I'm not sure that a computer program is ever better than face time with an educated teacher.
ReplyDeleteMy school also has not met AYP the past several years. One thing we just started this year was a math lab for our struggling learners. This is in addition to the students' regular class. We actually spent awhile over the summer looking for a computer program that would allow students to move at their own pace and practice their deficient skills. The students were excited about these tutorial programs. The tutorials are very visual and the students are working hard at them because they want to finally have some success in math. One of Marzano's effective teaching strategies is practice and I think tutorials (especially conceptual ones and not just drill and kill ) in addition to the regular classroom can be useful for extra practice. We will see if this program helps these students.
ReplyDeleteWhich program did you choose to try? Are you finding that it is tailoring itself to your students? Do you find that they are transferring the skills from the tutorial into the classroom?
ReplyDeleteWe chose a program called Modumath. All of these students are in Algebra 1. We have the students working on tutorials to help them develop their basic math skills like operations with fractions, decimals, and other prior knowledge skills they would need to be more successful in their algebra class. We are still trying to figure out what data we can collect to demonstrate that the program is helping the students since it does not correlate directly to the regular course they are taking. At the end of each tutorial is a test the students must get an 80% or higher on, but we need to create like a cumulative post-test to demonstrate progress.
ReplyDeleteMy district was overusing computer tutorials as remediation, but has recently rethought that idea. At my school, more freedom has been given to the teachers as to how and when the tutorial software is utilized. This has enabled our students to receive remediation as needed, preventing burnout or the "point and click" syndrome. We are also able to utilize computer lab time for other meaningful activities incorporating technology, such as, podcasts, webquests, interactive differentiation, spreadsheets, newsletters, etc.
ReplyDeleteColeen