First off a major issue I have with this article is when it was published. 1979? Now I respect this for what it is but seriously 1979? Is there nothing else since then?
Okay, now that we're clear that I'm not impressed with the timeliness of the article here we go on my impressions of the content. First off it seems to me like it almost as much a commentary on meta-analysis as it is a comparison of A-T. Secondly I'm not uber impressed with the selection criteria that were used to find studies to summarize. I think lumping some data together while excluding some data sets is problematic. Finally I'm not convinced, with the information presented, that they could accurately reject the null hypothesis, I think the deviations and effect size were too small.
Before I talk about what I think about A-T I wanted to reveal the results of an ERIC search on A-T. Doing an advanced search for the keywords "audio" and "tutorial" including all publication years resulted in 411 hits. Performing the same search limiting the results to the year range of 1990-2009 resulted in just 30. Moving the limit up to the year 2000 dropped it to only 13 results. So maybe the reason we're reading an article from 1979 that almost says A-T doesn't work is that...it didn't work.
HOWEVER- technology has changed tremendously in the past 30 years and so now we may be experiencing a time when A-T is more successful. Students today are "plugged in" so maybe it would work better now. I could see many possible uses for this type of learning, especially in technical fields. I also see where this fits in with technologies like Elluminate where discussion can be facilitated.
Bottom-line- Would I use A-T in my classroom. Surprisingly- Yes. BUT I teach Career and Technical Education where step-by-step approaches are sometimes necessary for tasks that students need to learn. I could see where things like Flash-based programs could be used to teach students how to say, create an irrigation system where they could "hear" from a customer and the lay out the system needed and then "test" it, with the software prompting correct choices kind of like a teacher would.
Who knows- maybe it's an idea whose time has finally come?
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2 comments:
Anthony, I had the same reaction when I realized how dated the research article was. I came to the conclusion that AT had almost died before the Internet and now it is in the second generation with all of the technologies the Internet makes available for use with AT methods. I would like to see a current study conducted. I think the results would be considerably different.
Karen Hughes
I am not sure if I could use that method for the whole course, but maybe including it for different sections of the course might be useful to keep things fresh.
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