welcome to our Web Portfolio. This portfolio contains a collection of our work during TECH4102 course (Evaluation in Educational Technology) at Sultan Qaboos University. We wish you find it useful and navigate it easily.

Great thanks for our instructor Dr. Aalla Sadik who opens our insights to the educational technology world as we will graduate from Instructional and Learning Technologies Department.

This portfolio done by Hiba AL-Julandani (teacher446@gmail.com) & Tamadher AL-Za'abi (tamah4@gmail.com).

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Comparative and non-comparative evaluation in educational technology

Wall, Higgins and Smith in their non comparative evaluation study titled “The visual helps me understand the complicated things’: pupil views of teaching and learning with interactive whiteboards” investigated pupil's views about learning with the interactive whiteboard. The context of this study was to evaluate the implementation of the IWBs in six Local Education Authorities (LEAs) dispersed throughout England.

This study aims at gathering information on the pupils’ perspective of IWB use and the resulting teaching and learning process and their views on learning and the impact of IWBs on meta-cognition. Eighty pupils; 46 boys and 34 girls from 12 schools in each LEA participated in this study. All participants have been interviewed using a method for speaking to children about meta-cognitive processes. This methodology uses templates designed to stimulate talk about learning. Templates contain images and speech bubbles to support discussion and role play in citizenship and values education. Bubbles are recognized by children as the learning context under scrutiny and discussion is initiated by this. The design of the image means that the pupil can interact with it: adding faces to the teacher and pupils and drawing representations of their favorite lesson on the IWB. This method is useful in overcoming any interviewer-interviewee tensions, especially when interviewees are children.

The study results show that the IWB offers high degree of interactivity and students engagement and considered as an effective tool from students' perspectives, where students' participation is vital for learning process making it easier. Moreover, using the IWB, the presentation of information can be done in different modes through colour and movement. This strengthens positive students view toward using IWB in that it motivates and reinforces students' concentration and attention.

However, Florence & Alvin in their comparative evaluation study titled "Online vocabulary games as a tool for teaching and learning English vocabulary" compared between face-to-face activity based instruction and online vocabulary computer games in students' learning and retention using pre-test and post-test. One of the this instrument's advantages is to ensure students did not give more attention than they should to the words appearing in the pre-test, no mention was made of the subsequent learning lessons and the post-test. In addition, in order to ensure that the subjects did not do the post-test by recalling the sequence of words used in the pre-test, the sequence of words and questions in the post-test was different.

They also use survey and group interview to evaluate the design and effectiveness of vocabulary online games from students view. Two evaluation models, namely CARE (Yuen & So, 1999) and WSE (Kim et al., 2001), were adopted in this study for designing the survey and interview questions. The two models cover the two aspects which are the technical and the educational aspect. One of the disadvantages of the instrument is that no information is given about the reliability and validity of the instruments.

The subjects of their study are 100 freshmen majoring in engineering in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The result shown that Vocabulary computer games tend to be better in students' learning and retention than face to face instruction. In addition, students show positive view toward the game like enjoyable, attractive and enhance interest of learning vocabulary.



References:
¡ Florence W. M. & Alvin C. M. (2006). Online vocabulary games as a tool for teaching and learning English vocabulary. Educational Media International, Vol. 43, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 233–249. Available at:
https://mail.squ.edu.om/owa/redir.aspx?C=2587424126d943f7a2fadbeae5f4c73d&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.informaworld.com%2findex%2f755293045.pdf
¡ Wall, Higgins & Smith. (2005). "The visual helps me understand the complicated things’: pupil views of teaching and learning with interactive whiteboards". British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 36 No 5 2005, 851–867. Retrieved 20 January 2009. Available at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118683426/PDFSTART



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