Student Software Use by Teacher's Objectives for Computer Use
As the previous section showed, teachers have widely varying objectives for students' use of computers according to the subject-matter that they
teach. For example, 82% of business education teachers report that reinforcing skill acquisition (mastering skills) is one of their top three objectives, compared to only 20% of social studies teachers. Do
teachers with such different objectives also have students use different types of software or do they merely use the same types of software in different ways? In order to answer this question, we compared software use
patterns for two groups of teachers—those who selected a given objective as being central to their use of computers versus those who did not select that objective. We repeated this for each of the 10 objectives. The
greater the difference in use of a given type of software between those who selected an objective and those who did not, the more we regarded use of that software as conditional on having or not having that objective in mind.[12] One key finding is that academic skills-related objectives such as reinforcement or remediation are associated with greater use of the software category "games for practicing
skills" and less use of everything else. This is consistent with the earlier finding that many teachers who use skill games software such as teachers in Cluster 2-3, are less likely to use other types of software. For
example, of teachers with "mastering skills" as an objective, only 37% use CD-ROM resources compared to 59% of other teachers. Similarly, only 28% of the skills-mastery teachers have students use the World Wide Web compared
to 50% of all other computer-assigning teachers. Comparable differences were found between teachers who prioritize "remediation" as an objective and those who do not.
Table 12 shows the situations where there are substantial differences in their students' use of particular types of software between teachers holding a given objective and those not
reporting it as one of their top three.[13]
Negative values indicate that a given type of software is less
likely to be used by teachers rating an objective as central than by teachers who did not rate it so highly. For example, Table 12 shows that the standardized difference (effect size) for CD-ROM use between those who prioritize mastering skills as an objective and those who do not is a negative –.45.
FIGURE 12: LIKELIHOOD OF EACH SOFTWARE USE TABLE 12. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OBJECTIVES FOR COMPUTER-USE AND
IF TEACHER HOLDS THE FOLLOWING OBJECTIVES
TYPES OF SOFTWARE USED (EFFECT SIZES)
Information retrieval objectives (i.e., "finding out about ideas and information") are quite naturally associated with the use of CD-ROMs (68% vs. 33%, effect size = .70) and the World Wide Web
(56% vs. 27%, E.S. = .59). But it is also the case that teachers who prioritize student written expression using computers also make use of CD-ROMs more than other teachers do (62% vs. 42%, E.S. = .39).
One other point: Teachers who prioritize having students use computers to present information to an audience not only are more likely than others to use presentation software, but they are also the
primary leaders in student use of multimedia authoring software such as Hyperstudio. Thirty percent of such teachers use multimedia authoring software with their students compared to 10% of
all other computer-assigning teachers. Looking at this from the opposite perspective, 39% of multimedia-authoring software users selected "presenting information to an audience" as a primary
objective of student computer use compared to 15% of all other computer-assigning teachers.