A cognitive demands analysis of a learning technology, a term that includes the hardware and the computer software products that form learning environments, attempts to describe the types of cognitive learning expected of the individual by the technology. This paper explores the context of cognitive learning, suggesting five families of cognitive…

Over the past 3 years, a variety of studies in intelligent tutoring system (ITS) effectiveness have been conducted. A summary is provided of the research into the use of POSIT, MALM, and the Mobile Subscriber Remote-Telephone Terminal (MSRT) Tutor. POSIT is an ITS for the tutoring of whole-number subtraction. It assumes that the learning of a…

Prior to college-level mathematics coursework, students are not routinely provided with the opportunity to engage in the kind of sustained mathematical thinking necessary to solve complex, multistep problems, most likely because of the difficulties that school mathematics teachers face in communicating problem settings and contexts that are…

The growing interest in the field of educational technology in the design of constructivist learning environments has led to a renewed examination of problem-based learning (PBL), an approach to instruction in which all learning results from students' efforts to solve a complex problem. Concurrent advances in technology make it possible to use…

No longer just a user of commercial software, the 21st century teacher is a designer of interactive software based on theories of learning. This software, a comprehensive study of straightline equations, enhances conceptual understanding, sketching, graphic interpretive and word problem solving skills as well as making connections to real-life and…

Selected examples using the statistical packages Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), and BMDP are presented to facilitate their use and encourage appropriate uses in: (1) a hierarchical design; (2) a confounded factorial design; and (3) variance component estimation procedures. To illustrate…

This study presents a formative evaluation of "The Intelligent Physics Tutor," an interactive software program designed to improve high school physics students' problem-solving skills. The purposes of this evaluation were to describe how the "Tutor" was used in the pilot high school class; to determine teacher and student…

A science classroom was used to study the effects of a shared intranet environment on students' problem-solving ability and metacognitive reflection skills through shared contextualization. Subjects were first-time 9th- and 10th-grade biology students from three public high schools. An evaluative analysis of the CourseInfo software (Blackboard,…

The development of a HyperCard application program, "Connecting to Your MARS Account," is described. The program was intended to assist users of the biomedical computer system at the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), the Medical ARchival System (MARS), to connect to their computer accounts. Criteria from instructional, graphical,…

This paper examines improving learning outcomes through redesigning information landscapes. The concept of information landscapes has been a constant theme in the development of interactive multimedia packages. For the user interface to this information to be effective and efficient, consideration must be given to the cognitive load placed on the…

This paper describes research into the use of cognitive tools in the classroom using "Exploring the Nardoo", an information landscape designed to support student investigation. Simulations and support tools which allow multimedia reporting are embedded in the package and are supported by several metacognitive tools for the writing…