PowerPoint slide provision and student performance: the moderating roles of self-efficacy and gender

Research on the pedagogical value of providing students with PowerPoint (PPT) slide handouts has produced mixed results. One reason for the inconsistent findings may be that most studies in this stream of research have neglected to examine individual differences. In the current study, we aimed to advance research on the pedagogical value of providing students with access to PPT slide handouts by examining whether self-efficacy and gender influence the effect of PPT slide provision on academic performance. We found no evidence to suggest that the provision of slide handouts has broad, unconditional pedagogical value. Instead, we found that both self-efficacy and gender moderated the extent to which the availability of the handouts enhanced or hindered students’ performance. As predicted, both students high on self-efficacy and males performed significantly better when they were provided with handouts. Conversely, students low on self-efficacy performed significantly worse when the handouts were provided. Female students also trended toward lower performance when the handouts were provided. Additionally, we found that students who were provided with PPT handouts perceived their instructor as more effective, and that this relation was mediated by students’ feeling of preparation. Finally, students also considered the provision of PPT handouts more valuable to their learning and course performance than one-to-one interactions with the professor. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Portfolios, Accountability, and an Interpretive Approach to Validity

How can the results of classroom-based portfolio assessment be communicated outside the classroom? How might a portfolio-based assessment system be designed and implemented? How can we evaluate the merits of portfolio-based assessments?     

Brief Research Report: The Message Behind Teacher Emotions

Abstract

We hypothesized that students use the message behind teacher emotions to interpret the cause of their failure and to form competence beliefs; hence, in failure situations teacher anger could be beneficial. In Experiment 1, participants made judgments about another student’s failure in the face of teacher pity versus anger. Lack of ability attributions were made and low competence was perceived, when pity was interpreted as the teacher attributed the failure to lack of ability. Lack of effort attributions were made when anger was interpreted as the teacher attributed the failure to lack of effort. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings by examining students responses to their own failure. Findings imply that expressing anger is less detrimental than many teachers suppose.     

Contents Volume 16 (2003)

Volume Contents

Contents Volume 16 (2003)     

The Great Media Debate and TPACK: A Multidisciplinary Examination of the Role of Technology in Teaching and Learning

This article bridges the fields of instructional design and teacher education, presenting and modernizing the media influence debate and synthesizing it with the technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) framework. Five modern technologies are presented as media comparison studies, analyzed from both the medium-as-variable and medium-and-method-as-variable perspectives, and highlighted in an example teaching and learning scenario analyzed for TPACK. The media debate is newly synthesized with TPACK, acknowledging the teacher as a critical variable in instructional success, and implications for research and teacher education and professional development are presented.     

‘A new discovery’ of Charles Hoole: method and practice in seventeenth-century English education

This article offers the first modern explication of the educational writings of Charles Hoole (1610–1667), arguing that his writings offer significant insight into the educational aims and methods of school instructors in seventeenth-century England. From attending to the needs of slow learners, to promoting learning games, to emphasising that children should be treated as rational actors, Hoole’s A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (1660) fused theoretical expositions on the aims of education with practical recommendations to schoolmasters on how to succeed in these aims. Hoole’s writings, as well as the earlier humanist pedagogical treatises of his peers, demonstrate that early and mid-seventeenth-century schoolmasters were already discussing and potentially implementing a number of educational initiatives that historians have traditionally credited to John Locke and later eighteenth-century educational theorists.     

Concurrent observations of barpress suppression and freezing: Effects of CS modality and on-line vs. off-line training upon posttrial behavior

In a conditioned suppression study with rats, CS modality (light vs. noise) and type of conditioning (on-line vs. off-line training) were manipulated. All rats were then tested on-line with only half the test trials reinforced. Some results and conclusions were as follows: (1) During initial training, suppression following reinforced noise trials was moderately strong at first but weakened over days; for the light, it was weak from the start. It was suggested that this strong influence of CS modality might complicate interpretations of posttrial suppression as a measure of US effectiveness. (2) During testing, posttrial suppression and freezing were greater following non-reinforced trials than following reinforced trials (US-omission effect), and this effect was stronger for noise than for light. Since noise also produced more freezing than light, this result favors the hypothesis that the US-omission effect is due to persistent CS-elicited freezing that is un-disrupted by a shock US. (3) Although noise produced more freezing, both noise and light produced similar barpress suppression. This result is consistent with the suggestion that noise and light acquire equal associative strength but elicit different defensive behaviors.