University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Educational Psychology 387
Computer Uses in Education

Multiple methodologies for evaluating computer uses in education

• VisIT
• progress reports
• Peter Siegel, CIO
• NSF Workshop, boiling point of radium
• EdPsy 490 I

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Multiple methodologies

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The Range of Methodologies

• Naturalistic observation
• Participant observation
• Interview
• Survey/Questionaire
• Quasi-experimental
• Experimental

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Kinds of evaluation

• Summative evaluation
• Formative evaluation

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Choosing a methodology

• What are your goals?
• How much do you know about what is happening?

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Examples of effective observation

• The "space bar" example
• The "DoIt" example

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The "space bar" example

• Push the space bar to continue.
• The students expected...

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The "DoIt" example

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And the user read "DoIt" (DO IT) as "Dolt" (DOLT)

dolt: a stupid person

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How to run your own web server

• Turning this computer into a web server
  • Personal web serving
  • Heavier duty web serving: "Recipes" from Web66

Process data

• Web logs:
  

  03/27/00	12:49:49	OK  	128.174.91.148	:default.html	34	
  

• LRS web logs
• EPS 304 White Paper Nov 99 log

Some methodological suggestions

• survey or questionaires
  • rank order and then reduce the number of questions
  • "debug" your questions - test them on a number of people before using them
  • end with some open ended questions
    • What is the best thing about this?
    • What is the worst thing?
    • What improvements would you suggest?
• observations
  • don't make suggestions, only respond to help questions, not volunteer help
  • whenever the user asks for help, note that down after giving help
  • write notes, both during and after
  • can followup observations with a survey at the end
  • for preliminary studies, use audio tape or video tape as a backup source of data to written notes