The diffusion of educational technology in Indonesia: a multi-faceted approach

Indonesia, like many developing countries, has problems of increasing numbers of students, shortage of qualified teachers, limited resources and strong support for traditional schooling. Educational technology has been introduced to help alleviate some of the problems and has been relatively successful over the past 15 years. A planned effort to use educational technology in appropriate ways began in the mid-1970s and is still growing. Such success does not come easily. The lessons learned from this effort are explicitly stated in four categories: (1) cultural affairs (2) personnel and training (3) organisation and management and (4) leadership. Each 'lesson' is stated as a principle or guideline. Conclusions emphasise the importance of leadership, commitment, local control, long-range planning and the presence of a communications satellite.     

Professors' and students' conceptualizations of the learning task in introductory physics courses

What are students expected to learn in physics courses? Eight expert physics teachers and researchers, two from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, Stanford University in the United States of America, and Monash University in Australia, described their perceptions of learning in their courses. Students from the courses were then interviewed for their perceptions of learning in physics courses. In their courses, professors focused on the development of intellectual skills, assuming that students had a specific physics vocabulary. Students, however, were aware of their own limitations and suggested that professors should take nothing for granted. Students considered that to be a good teacher, a professor should know the perspective of the students and should start at the students' level. The results suggested that the intellectual challenge of learning physics merits early explanation.     

The evaluation of faculty development programs

This article reviews literature pertinent to the evaluation of faculty development programs and presents data from several studies conducted at two institutions. These data were consistent with those previously reported in that faculty participants consistently expressed satisfaction with development services. In addition, one study found that most faculty members voluntarily took some action to improve their instructional effectiveness, though only a minority pursued these efforts in depth. Volunteers who worked intensively with a faculty development consultant improved more on objective measures of effectiveness than did those who were only superficially involved in improvement efforts; those who received no consultative assistance failed to improve significantly. Evidence from a final study provided a control for faculty motivation and led to the conclusion that improvement was contingent both on faculty desire to improve and on the availability of professional assistance.     

Communications programs in higher education

Summary There has been a steady growth of communications programs in higher education. These programs are interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the mass media. Even though there continues to be active concern and questioning regarding the spread of these programs, they continue to be established and will continue to grow, if experience is any indication. There is little consistency in the administrative patterns of organization. The administrative labels cover the gamut from departments and loosely organized committees to schools and colleges. It is possible to find institutions which offer bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in communications, the degree being dependent upon the institution. There are many traditional academic areas represented in the various programs but the three most common areas are: journalism, radio-television and audiovisual-cinema. All programs seem to draw heavy support from courses in the social sciences. This discussion leaves many unanswered questions. What are the forces which caused programs to be established? What is being accomplished under the communications label that could not otherwise be accomplished? How do the objectives and curricula compare? These and other questions will be answered in subsequent articles.     

Content analysis in AV communication research

Conclusion We have briefly attempted to deineate the field of content analysis of communication media and point out of value of content analysis as a method of audio-visual research. On the following pages is a bibliography of that part of the literature on content analysis which seems mostuseful for audio-visual researchers.While the bibliography is fairly comprehensive it does tend to omit studies dealing with the analysis of printed materials. The quantitative analysis of the content of instructional materials has been virtually neglected. Here some useful applications of the technique are made to audio-visual communication research. Donald Auster is an instructor in the Audio-Visual Center at Indiana University.     

Some lessons to be learned from a decade of general education outcomes assessment with the ACT COMP measures

In the last decade, the ACT COMP Composite Exam and Objective Test have been the most frequently used standardized measures of cognitive general education outcomes. This article reviews the literature addressing uses of the COMP measures in order to evaluate valid and reliable uses of the COMP measures. It concludes that worthwhile evaluations of uses of the COMP measures can only take place in wellcrafted general education program evaluations, and that many reported general education program evaluations incorporate both untenable assumptions and flawed practices. The article concludes with suggestions for improving general education program evaluations.Donald B. Yarbrough received his B.A. in English literature from Hendrix College, his M.A. in Germanic languages and literature from the University of Kentucky, and his Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Georgia. He is currently an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Iowa, where he teaches and conducts research in two specialty areas, program evaluation and the cognitive psychology of school learning. This article grew out of an on-going investigation of how best to define and measure the cognitive outcomes of post-secondary general education programs.A portion of this research was presented at the Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, San Francisco, CA, May, 1991.     

Reading and spelling difficulties in high school students: Causes and consequences

Basic skills in reading and spelling and supporting metalinguistic abilities were assessed in ninth and tenth grade students in two school settings. Students attending a private high school for the learning disabled comprised one group and the other comprised low to middle range students from a public high school. Both the LD students and the regular high school students displayed deficiencies in spelling and in decoding, a factor in reading difficulty that is commonly supposed to dwindle in importance after the elementary school years. Treating the overlapping groups as a single sample, multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the contribution of nonword decoding skill and phonological and morphological awareness to spelling ability. The analysis revealed that decoding was the major component, predicting about half of the variance in spelling. The effect of phonological awareness was largely hidden by its high correlation with decoding, but was a significant predictor of spelling in its own right. Morphological awareness predicted spelling skill when the words to be spelled were morphologically complex. An additional study showed that differences in decoding and spelling ability were associated with differences in comprehension after controlling for reading experience and vocabulary. Even among experienced readers individual differences in comprehension of text reflect efficiency of phonological processing at the word level.