Vol. 12, No. 2, June 1996

Investigating verbal interactions when primary children use computers

M. Wild, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia

Email m.wild@cowan.edu.au

This paper is based upon some early results of a research project currently underway at Edith Cowan University to investigate the nature of young children's interactions centred on and around the use of new technologies for learning. The research focused on children working in dyads on a single computer-based language task; the software used was chosen to facilitate children's talk. This paper reports a number of findings, including the difficulties of predicting the quality of children's interactions at the computer; the likely significance of a wide range of factors that influence children's interactions; and, the lack of patterns in children's interactions over time. From the analysis of the data, two categorisations are given which might be useful to guide further research into the nature of children's interactions using the computer. The first categorisation is a checklist of verbal interaction types, and the second, a checklist for metacognitive components in children's interactions.

Keywords: Collaborative behaviour; Primary; Small groups; Talk; Verbal interactions

Accepted: 17 April 1995

IT culture in medical education

N.J. Fox, Department of General Practice, University of Sheffield

Email: n.j.fox@sheffield.ac.uk

A survey of the Information Technology (IT) skills and attitudes of 180 pre-clinical students at two UK medical schools are reported. Medical School A had little in the way of an 'IT culture', while School B runs a short course in informatics in the first year, and regularly employs IT and CAL applications in teaching and learning. School A students were less likely to consider their skills to be 'adequate' for their educational needs. Students at School B rated IT skills as of greater importance for both their current and future needs as undergraduates, but over 87% of both groups considered IT competency as 'essential' or 'important' for their future in medical practice. These, and other findings, are discussed in relation to the impact of 'IT culture', including training in informatics within the undergraduate medical curriculum.

Keywords: Computers; Curriculum; Education, Information technology; Medical; UK; Undergraduate

Accepted: 20 May 1995

Measuring users' performance with interactive information systems

R. Oliver, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia

Email: r.oliver@cowan.edu.au

The purpose of this study was to investigate the discrete forms of knowledge required for successful use of interactive information systems (IIS). Using an existing framework, an instrument was created to measure the achievement of three discrete forms of knowledge among novice users of an CD-ROM encyclopedia. The instrument included tasks designed to measure users' knowledge and skills in managing and controlling the system, navigating between information nodes and selecting appropriate search strategies given information related problems. The study examined hierarchical knowledge and compared the development of these forms of knowledge and skills among novices using two different IIS. The results found significant differences in the user performances between two systems in tasks that measured navigation skills and an understanding of the information organisation. It is suggested that these differences were due to differences in the interface design of the two systems and suggestions are made for selecting and implementing IIS systems in school and educational settings.

Keywords: CD-ROM; Interactive systems; Performance; Schools

Accepted: 15 June 1995

Software standards in undergraduate computing courses

M. Joy and M. Luck, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick

Email: m.s.joy@dcs.warwick.ac.uk

High-quality software must be robust, reliable and maintainable. The design and coding of such software is no longer a craft; it is an engineering discipline, and the teaching of computer programming must reflect this. Consequently, students need to be aware of the importance of formulating accurate specifications for programming tasks, and of coding programs which correctly implement such specifications. However, the increase in student numbers experienced in recent years has caused manual methods of assessing students' programming assignments to become inefficient, and consistency more difficult to enforce. In order to support and motivate a rigorous approach in the context of these difficulties, an innovative on-line assessment system for programming language modules has been developed which addresses both concerns. This paper describes the package and discusses its importance in the delivery and assessment of undergraduate programming modules.

Keywords: Automated marking; Programming assessment; Programming skills; Software standards

Accepted: 26 August 1995

Designing educational software as a re-usable resource

I. Neilson and R. Thomas, ICBL, Heriot Watt University and Department of Engineering, Cambridge University

Email: ien@csc.liv.ac.uk

The production of educational software is moving from a focus on courseware produced by the individual lecturer to the development of educational resources that can be shared and accessed from a wide variety of teaching sites. This change has a number of implications. Firstly, different resources must be capable of being seamlessly integrated into a specific teaching package. Secondly, collaboration between institutions will be increasingly important to ensure that resources so produced are sufficiently generic to be of interest to those outside the development team. Thirdly, management procedures to direct and control this collaborative effort are required. This paper details how the distributed hypermedia environment provided by the World Wide Web may be effectively exploited to realise these three goals.

Keywords: Hypermedia; Simulations; World-wide Web

Accepted: 16 October 1995