Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The educational research community attracts practitioners and policy makers interested in both consuming and producing high quality educational research methodologies. Over time, research findings significantly contribute to continuing educational theory as well as educational management and professional practice. Until now researchers have been able to understand the interactivity of instructional strategies and cognitive performance in traditional learning models. While the community has been exposed to these findings through professional publications and the electronic media; with the advent of Web-based educational research, the same cannot be said about dissemination from this emerging techno-educational paradigm. Is this due to the complex nature of the contributing factors involved with educational management that involves information and communications technologies (ICT) in the Web-mediated learning environments? In terms of the relationship between information technology and education management, defining such educational research is becoming quite difficult. This paper analyses research by practitioners primarily interested in Web-based education. To examine the trends, contributions are examined from a wide range of educational researchers at a recent international conference that attracted participants from 29 countries. These trends will be extrapolated to map the future of Web-based education management based on international synergies in research communities of practice.

Researchers and practitioners recognise the crucial links between ICT Access and ICT Ability in promoting ICT Use. This paper is the third in a series exploring this link, and concentrates specifically on approaches to ICT Ability. This paper considers literature and research relating to ICT PD from a variety of sources and countries. Building on a model proposed at the ITEM2002 conference, the paper explores research conducted in a selection of schools in England, and then discusses one implementation of ICT PD programmes in Australia. Results of this implementation are discussed, concluding that it may be a valuable model for other schools seeking to leverage ICT use for educational innovation.

This article reports on the lessons learnt from the implementation of a computerized information system (CIS) for managing human resources at the Ministry of Education in Botswana, and on the usage of CISs in the management of secondary schools in Uganda. The findings from these African studies portray the levels of usage, their impact and the critical success factors that most influence the utilization of the CISs. in both countries, clerical usage of the CISs was reported. User training is reported as the most important determinant of CIS usage in both Uganda and Botswana. In Uganda, managerial usage by school managers is very limited, but users are generally positive concerning the effects of CISs use. In Botswana, the direct usage by managers is also limited as is use for decision-making. It is concluded that wider and better CIS usage can be promoted by carefully designed user training, grounded on a thorough analysis of the needs of the user group.

The study reports two design experiments on the pre-service teacher program to advance their understanding of learning as knowledge building. We designed the course with a CSCL tool. In the first year, we did not have information on students’ characteristics. Analyses of students’ final essays and their discourse activities on the CSCL showed: (1) that we failed to improve students’ understanding at our expected level, (2) that collaborative students reached a deeper understanding than isolated students, and (3) that students’ beliefs of didactic instruction resisted the new perspective on learning we introduced. In the second year, we designed the course to overcome students’ resistance and to facilitate more frequent collaboration among them by: (1) making the course project-based, (2) having students in a small group use a computer for their collaboration between groups, and (3) involving them in collaborative problem-solving as learners. Results in the second year, compared with those in the first year, showed a crucial improvement of students’ conceptual understanding.

Analysis of collaborative e-test construction identified the number of test-authors as the most important factor in test validity, while test reliability depends more on participation of an expert. Based on these findings, a collaborative e-test construction system was developed that uses predicted response-time and score distributions to improve the reliability of tests constructed by novice test-authors. A gamma distribution is used as the predicted response-time distribution, and a mixed model of binomial distributions is used as the predicted score distribution. An experiment in which a novice and an expert test-author each constructed tests by using and not using these predicted distributions showed that those constructed using them were more reliable, although those constructed by the expert had even higher reliability.

This paper introduces an electronic report submission system that helps effective learning of algorithms and programming. It proposes a three-phase reviewing system that involves self-reviewing of algorithms, self-reviewing of programs and staff reviewing. This is an improvement of our existing two-phase reviewing system that only supports the latter two phases. In the additional phase for algorithmic checking, learners describe an algorithm graphically using PAD, compile it, and execute it to verify their algorithm first without being troubled by syntax of a programming language; this supplies effectiveness to the efficient self-reviewing system.