ndividualized Instruction is not:
A one-to-one student/teacher ratio, as many people would assume. It is not even one-to-one tutoring.
At the very least, neither of these is even realistically possible. No school system could afford anything close to a one-to-one student/teacher ratio or private tutoring. Even the most expensive public school system in the United States (Washington, DC, 2003, approximately $11,000 per student per year) would require at least 5 students per teacher to pay teacher salaries, without anything left for buildings or non-teaching staff.
Definitions of Individualized Instruction on the Web:
"Instruction of a student based on his or her unique learning style."
"One of the key tenets of special education. The specific instruction and types of services provided to the student is tailored to fit the student and wholly depends on the educational needs of the student."
"Curriculum content and instructional materials, media, and activities designed for individual learning. The pace, interests, and abilities of the learner determine the curriculum."
All of these are accurate. But none of them is an adequate definition of Individualized Instruction, because II is so much more than what even all of them together might suggest. Genuine II certainly is based upon individual students' own learning styles, but it is not limited to only special education students. The last description is the closest, suggesting that the pace of instruction can vary as well.
Individualized Instruction is:
A method of managing the instructional process without requiring live lectures from teachers. Because lectures consume approximately 80% of an average teacher's in-class time, to say nothing of the time needed to prepare lessons. Freeing that time allows teachers the luxury of more time to work privately with individual students as needed.
Lecturing is an inherently inefficient method of conveying information. The average student retains only approximately 10% of what is presented in a lecture, but without substantial reinforcement that figure falls to an abysmal 2% or less within 24 hours.
Why waste the time of either teacher or student on a process that is so ineffective?
Instead, Educational Research Associates concluded that placing greater reliance upon well-designed instructional materials – whether audio, video, multimedia CAI, or simply a good textbook – can hardly be less efficient than the lecture method, but yields a huge net benefit by freeing teachers to focus upon the needs and problems of individual students.
Therefore, since 1965 ERA has been developing and applying innovative classroom and school management methods, and instructional materials that maximize student retention and understanding under those circumstances.
Over the years we developed a variety of methods in our quest to improve services to students:
Beginning in 1962, we developed our own interpretation of B. F. Skinner's "teaching machine". They were very successful in giving students immediate feedback about what they understood and didn't, and permitted them to progress independently. We even published some of the materials we developed in simplified form in what we called "programmed education packets" and sold them to many other schools. Five or ten years later others used concepts like those in materials like those called "programmed texts."
By that time, however, ERA had already moved far beyond those concepts.
Although the teaching machines and programmed packets had be used for academic subjects like English grammar, punctuation, and composition, we first came upon another advance when we recognized the limitations of instructors in typing classes. A teacher could only supervise a single instruction or drill class at a time. If there weren't enough students to fill a class, they had to wait until there were enough. In a small school such as ours scheduling became a nightmare. But we recognized that typing drills were extraordinarily repetitive – the teacher merely gives page numbers in a book and says "start" and "stop". But why waste the time of a valuable teacher on such mundane tasks? We recorded drill instructions and prepared a special room wired with three channels of audio. Students could come to class for any one of three scheduled drills. All the instructor had to do was start the recordings, and then he/she had time to observe students and give them suggestions. The instructor could cut in and give instructions to all the students on an audio channel, or a single student at a time. We called this method Monitor Instruction. Five or ten years later this kind of technology was refined and used in language labs.
But by that time we had recognized the limitations of the original Monitor Instruction concept and had extended it to include introductory lessons in typing, business machines, and even shorthand. to give greater flexibility by allowing a single instructor to offer and supervise two or three lessons or drills simultaneously through hard-wired channels from Dictaphone machines playing lessons on wax belts. This permitted the instructor to observe students much more closely than was previously possible when teachers had to spend so much time lecturing. The teacher could learn more about how individual students studied and the problems each tended to encounter.
السبت نوفمبر 08, 2008 10:22 pm
