[edtech] Crosstalk seminar reminder - Thursday, Nov 18, 2:00pm, 4-231

[Jean Foster]

Please join us Thursday for this presentation by Prof. David Pritchard
of the Physics department.


The Promise and Reality of Web-based Tutoring
Professor David E. Pritchard, MIT physics department
Thursday, November 18, 2004
2:00 p.m.
Room 4-231

Abstract
Textbooks, Lectures, and most educational uses of the web are like
broadcast radio: a message is prepared and broadcast, one can find out
how many people are listening, but knowing that the message has been
received remains elusive. In my view the great promise of the web is two
way learning: individual responses for the student, formative and
summative assessment for the teacher, and data and guidance to help the
author improve the material and the pedagogy. Web-based intelligent
tutors offer interactive tutoring for individual students, such as
pedagogically useful responses to their wrong answers and hints and
simpler subproblems upon student request. 

Our research shows that one such tutor (see www.mycybertutor.com)
teaches about twice as much per unit time as hand-graded written
homework. Feedback from the students can reveal specific student
mistakes and misconceptions, provide rich data allowing authors to
improve their content, and show class difficulties on each problem for
Just In Time Teaching. Our research shows that assessing the process of
solution can give a far more accurate profile of student skills than can
testing, allowing targeted remediatioin. Splitting the class into two
groups that work the same problem after one group has been given a
tutorial allows us to measure and improve the amount of learning per
unit time from the tutorial. We are currently investigating why some
pedagogies transfer several times more knowledge per unit of student
time than others.
-- 
Jean Foster
Communications Coordinator
MIT IS&T Academic Computing
N42-040, x3-3909