CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, April 28, 2009

CMU, Pitt cooperate to find ways to make homework more effective

Post Gazette: "Homework is a given in virtually any school.
Now researchers at the Pittsburgh Science Learning Center -- a collaboration of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh -- say they've found a way to make homework more effective."

5 comments:

Katherine! said...

This seems like a really interesting study to try and perform. It's so interesting that the computer can monitor what the student has learned and if they are actually studying. I wish they would do this study within the school of drama to see if our homework is productive, though I guess it is easier to judge math comprehension than drama comprehension.

Chris said...

I think this article, while interesting is very vague. They mentioned two findings that things are learned best when repeated over a long period of time and that students spend time looking over solution manuals. I feel that both of these are common knowledge. I would like to know what the studies are trying to prove or discover, it is not clear from the article if there is any goal in mind at all. While I agree that learning about learning is a very important part of education and will drive us and our education system forward, I think that we need to bring our system up to speed first before we bring it into the future.

David Beller said...

While I believe that this kind of research is extremely valuable, at a time when the economy is struggling so much, it is hard to justify such costs. Evaluating learning strategies and habits while doing homework is an important step in divulging the importance of the homework itself. However, at a time when people are wondering whether or not they can afford to continue their schooling for the upcoming year, I believe that this is a misdirected use of money at the current time. Also, this type of study is only applicable to more fact based skills, and thus would be more difficult to apply in the School of Drama.

Unknown said...

This is interesting, but they need to make sure that that is going to limit the amount of problems that they can assign for homework since the others will have the answers to them (at least for high school). Because the average person gets progressively less selfish until the age of about twenty two, they need to realize that high school students, especially if they do not care too much for the subject will just go on and cheat, but for the texts themselves, I think it is a fabulous idea.

MichaelSimmons said...

I had to do a project on Cognitive Tutoring earlier this year. It's a really, really great idea that going to change the way children learn. It allows each child to recieve individual attention from an expert in education, even if that expert is a virtual one, without having to have one teacher per student.

It seems like that is really going to be helpful. I know that I had a little experience working with cognitive tutors on my own homework in high school math, and I can't remember a math class that I actually learned so much in.