Abstract
This paper presents a study carried out at Beijing Normal University with the aim of investigating whether semi-finished products could affect liberal arts students’ mastery of knowledge, mastery of operational skills and ICT self-efficacy in multimedia creation. The literature has argued that obstacles in creating multimedia artifacts lead liberal arts students to have low ICT self-efficacy. Semi-finished products are used as a scaffolding to facilitate liberal arts students’ creation of multimedia artifacts, such as Flash animations and interactive web-pages. However, empirical research on the effects of such scaffolding is lacking. We conducted a quasi-experiment in which we compared an experimental class of 117 students majoring in History with a control class of 102 students majoring in Chinese Language and Literature who took a Multimedia Technology and Webpage Producing (MTWP) course. The experimental class (revising condition) used semi-finished products to develop animations and web-pages while the control class (creating condition) developed animations and web-pages from scratch. Data were collected through a Knowledge and Skill Test and a Scale on ICT self-efficacy. T-tests were used to compare outcomes of the two conditions. Results revealed that students’ mastery of knowledge in the revising condition was significantly higher than students in the creation condition, but there were no significant differences between the two conditions in terms of students’ mastery of operational skills. Results also showed that there were significant differences between the two conditions in terms of students’ ICT self-efficacy. Further analysis indicated that students’ ICT self-efficacy in the revising condition improved significantly from pre-test to post-test, while those in the creating condition declined, but it was not significant. Implications for ICT teaching in higher education were discussed.
Highlights
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) literacy was defined as the ability of “using digital technology, communications tools, and/or networks to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge society” (Panel, 2002)
We conducted a quasi-experiment in which we compared an experimental class of 117 students majoring in History with a control class of 102 students majoring in Chinese Language and Literature who took a Multimedia Technology and Webpage Producing (MTWP) course
At Beijing Normal University (BNU), Multimedia Technology and Webpage Producing (MTWP) is one of the common required ICT courses offered to liberal arts students, while science and engineering students learn to program
Summary
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) literacy was defined as the ability of “using digital technology, communications tools, and/or networks to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge society” (Panel, 2002). In China, universities have offered a set of common required ICT courses to their students, aiming to improve students’ ICT skills, computational thinking and design thinking. At Beijing Normal University (BNU), Multimedia Technology and Webpage Producing (MTWP) is one of the common required ICT courses offered to liberal arts students, while science and engineering students learn to program. The Design-Based Learning (DBL) strategy is commonly adopted as an effective strategy by many MTWP teachers. In this approach, students are required to design multimedia artifacts with specific software tools, such as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. Some teachers prefer to require students to create new works from scratch, while some others prefer to provide students with existing semi-finished products as a scaffolding
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