Finding
This is a faulty model because cassette lessons are, potentially at least, capable of providing interaction between the instructor and a student.
Paper
TAPE TUTOR: Assisted Instruction
Citations: 2
Full textAbstract
THE AUDIO CASSETTE RECORDER was introduced for home entertainment by the North American Philips Company on July 10, 1966. In the decade since that date, the cassette recording has quickly become a key component in educational technology. It has proven a highly reliable, efficient and inexpensive medium for remote or delayed communication between teacher and student. Audio recordings, when well designed, are capable of stimulating, directing, and motivating students to learn as well as they do in a "live" classroom. (Popham 1961; Wasson and Thorman 1975; Thorman 1976.) However, even the most enthusiastic advocates of audio education are concerned about some shortcomings of this type of instruction. Unless students are well motivated, they tend to lose interest and to procrastinate. Without the social environment of the classroom even highly motivated students, find it easy to become passive listeners rather than active learners. Cassette lessons often follow the model of a lecture delivered to a large class in a large auditorium where size of the room and the number in attendance preclude any real interchange between student and teacher. This is a faulty model because cassette lessons are, potentially at least, capable of providing interaction between the instructor and a student. The cassette lesson when modelled after the auditorium lecture is excessively prescriptive, and information is cast, almost exclusively, in the form of declarative sentences. The recording is used to describe, explain, expound, inform and direct, but it is not used to interrogate. If questions are asked, they are rhetorical because no answer is expected or is, in fact, possible. The fault, of course, lies in the technology. If it were possible to use a less formal and more interactive model, the form of a recorded lesson could be more stimulating. The instructor could pause occasionally and say, "Now, did you understand what I just said? Here is a problem for you to solve" or "On the basis of the concept that I just explained, would you expect ... .? The interactive model would permit a teacher to implement the ancient Socratic method and the contemporary Ausubel (1968) strategy of the "advance organizer." Every experienced teacher knows that a thoughtful question can draw students to levels of understanding they could not achieve by themselves or would not reach by merely listening to the same information. The cassette recorder allows an instructor to reach one student at a time and, thus, it individualizes instruction at a time when universities count their students in tens of thousands. This one-on-one relationship is an extraordinary advantage: the cassette lesson is defective only because it fails to provide a medium of interaction between one teacher and one learner. The Office of Individualized Learning at The University of Michigan-Dearborn recognized the deficiency of the cassette lesson several years ago and began a series of studies to define the problem and to discover a solution. These studies revealed that the real need is for a device that can be used with a cassette recorder to identify correct responses to questions with the instantaneous speed of a computer, but without the complexity or great cost of a computer. Design criteria were developed for the desired device. These criteria included the following:
Authors
E. C. Hertzler
Journal
American Biology Teacher