Patterns of Microcomputer Use in Teaching Mathematics and Science

Abstract

This study describes how teachers nominated as “successful” in their microcomputer-based instruction teach mathematics and science, and how their computer use differs in response to district, school, classroom, and individual characteristics. Research carried out in sixty classrooms, forty-nine schools, and twenty-five districts in California provided data on district and school microcomputer policies; classroom contexts; and teachers' characteristics, instructional decisions, and practices. Teachers' microcomputer-based instruction systematically varied according to their goals; extent of microcomputer use, integration into the curriculum, and coordination with other activities; and the extent to which they varied the modes of computer instruction, ranging from almost exclusive drill and practice to the orchestration of drill and practice, tutorials, simulations, microworlds, and games. This diversity was related to teachers' subject matter and computer knowledge, and the student composition of their classrooms. Teachers with extensive undergraduate coursework in science tended to use drill and practice, whereas teachers with substantial courseware knowledge tended to orchestrate various modes. Students in classrooms characterized as low in ability and high in minority percentages received drill-and-practice instruction while students in classrooms characterized as high in ability and low in minority percentages received “orchestrated” instruction.