USING INTERACTIVE WEB-BASED APPLICATIONS TO IMPLEMENT AfL PRACTICES

Promoting student engagement in large lecture halls has always been a challenge for teachers, and various innovations are used to foster student engagement in environments where teacher-student interactions are difficult. For instance, Web-based applications can facilitate classroom communication, but can they be effective in delivering interactive instructional strategies and ultimately improving student achievement?

We believe that a web-based application suite called LectureTools can be an effective means of implementing Assessment for Learning (AfL), an instructional strategy emphasizing feedback from teachers to students, a well as from students to teachers. AfL principles rely on this two-way feedback to help teachers understand students’ progress so that they can adapt their teaching to meet the needs of the students. Just as importantly, feedback from the teachers to the students helps the students understand where they stand regarding comprehension and progress in a course. Providing this feedback in a timely manner is essential in promoting behavioral change when it matters: as teaching and learning are occurring.

Our presentation will describe how we use Web-based applications to implement AfL strategies in an introductory Earth science course with high student enrollment. Using a quasi-experimental design, we investigate the effects of this pedagogy on student performance and motivation by comparing sections of an Ocean Systems course using AfL strategies with classrooms using the more traditional Power-Point presentations and “clickers.” We use pretest/posttest survey data supplemented by student interviews to assess achievement and to understand how student attitudes and behavior are affected when the Internet plays an integral role in interactive, AfL-based instruction.