This report compares two methods of teaching BASIC programming used to develop computer literacy among children in grades three through seven in British Columbia. Phase one of the project was designed to instruct children in grades five to seven on the arithmetic operations of writing simple BASIC programs. Instructional methods included using job…

Briefly describes a study of five New York City high schools conducted to determine the impact of microcomputers in schools. Interviews and surveys were used to address issues including student and teacher attitudes toward computers, teaching methods, teacher-student interactions, and differences between computer instruction and regular classes.…

Designed to develop procedures and acquire information to help decision-makers establish policies for the use of microcomputers for computer-assisted instruction (CAI), this study involved the following steps: (1) a school-based research project was conducted to determine the costs and effects of microcomputer-assisted instruction; (2) an…

This study of the effectiveness of electronic blackboards in three introductory sociology classes at the University of Regina tested the hypothesis that this microcomputer-based presentational technology would have a negative impact on faculty productivity due to the increased amount of preparation time, and a positive impact on the quality of…

The costs, effects, and utility of mathematics instruction supplemented by microcomputer presentations were compared with those of traditional classroom approaches for grades 3 and 5. The study was completed at a single school in a rural area of Saskatchewan, Canada, where two classrooms at each grade level were used in a pretest-posttest design.…

A quantitative or meta-analytic review was conducted of studies comparing computer-based education (CBE) to conventional instruction in precollege classrooms. Seventy-four studies were included in the review; sources included earlier reviews by Hartley, Burns, and authors from the University of Michigan, and the ERIC and Comprehensive Dissertation…

This in-depth review of the literature synthesizes articles and abstracts identified as education-oriented microcomputer research studies published since 1979. A brief, historic overview of educational computing is followed by a review of the Becker (1983) survey, which concerned the distribution of microcomputers in education in the United…

This paper explores the issue of how, when, and where to teach keyboarding at the elementary school level through a review of the keyboarding literature and descriptions of three studies conducted with fifth grade students in the laboratory school at the University of Wyoming. The literature review briefly summarizes findings on the following…

This paper discusses the results of research on learning LOGO programming language by two groups of fifth grade students who were taught using either a structured tutorial mode or an unstructured discovery method. Previous results showed mastery differences between the structured and unstructured teaching methods with the results favoring the…

Discusses study that was designed to examine the effects of microcomputers on the ecology of secondary special education classrooms and explains the MICROS Observation System, which was used to collect observational data. The effects of microcomputer use on student behavior and teacher behavior are described. (25 references) (Author/LRW)

This review of the literature on computer assisted instruction (CAI) focuses on the use of CAI with grades K-13, and specifically assesses the relative merits of traditional instruction and CAI in promoting student achievement. Also assessed are the applications of CAI in the area of special education. Three types of reviews are used exclusively:…

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a computer-based instruction (CBI) tutorial in accounting education as compared to traditional classroom lectures. In the first experiment (involving over 200 students), two instructors taught one class section each using the lecture method and one class section each using the…

A study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of interactive video in teaching study skills and to discover: (1) the overall attitudes of students toward computer-directed instruction (CDI) as compared to traditional teaching methods; (2) whether two groups, instructed via CDI and traditional methods, differed significantly in knowledge of…

To examine the role of elaborations in learning a procedural skill (i.e., using a personal computer) from an instructional text, 88 members of the Carnegie-Mellon University community (students, faculty, and staff members) participated in two experiments. Experimental sessions consisted of a reading period followed by a task performance period in…

Research was undertaken to investigate various methods of presentation of a computer based science simulation as it related to student content knowledge of the simulation concepts. Three treatment groups of sixth grade students were used in the study: (1) two students per computer interacting with the simulation; (2) a total class presentation of…