Edmonds, K. & Li, Q. (2005, April). Teaching At-Risk Students with Technology: Teachers’ Beliefs, Experiences, and Strategies for Success. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Retrieved July 18, 2008, from Education Resources Information Center (ED490354).
At-risk students struggle with learning. They bring various barriers to the classroom requiring teachers to find appropriate ways to help them succeed. Wallis stated that technology is becoming more recognized as an alternate method for teaching and learning. Some advantages to using technology with at-risk students are increased motivation, individualized instructions, and freedom to work in their own way. Findings showed that students have increased self-esteem and are more enthusiastic towards school when working with technology (Wallis, 2004). Additionally, students may find computers provide an accurate and unbiased response to their work, thus relieving the teacher of that role. Both student-teacher relationships, and student-student interactions, change to one of help and collaboration. The main reason for this, Christie and Sabers concurred (1989), is the locus of control is in the hands of the students giving them freedom and responsibility at the same time. In the other words, technology offers enriched learning environments, and changes the role of learners - two important elements for teaching at-risk learners.
This is a survey study exploring teachers’ perspective and approaches to teaching at-risk students using technology. This survey focused on three variables: teachers’ beliefs, experiences, and strategies for success. It is believed that at-risk students will learn better when the teaching and learning processes use appropriate technology. But, little is known how teachers perceive the incorporation of technology in teaching. The are three purposes of this study, namely: (a) to explore the experiences and approaches of teachers who use technology to instruct struggling students; (b) to examine the difficulties that teachers encounter when using technology with at-risk learners; and (c) to look at the teachers’ beliefs that will uncover issues that burden these students.
The research questions are not explicitly stated in this paper. Based on the topic and purposes, it is likely that the questions will look like as follows: how teachers’ beliefs, experiences, and strategies help at-risk students using technology?
The participants were nine female teachers who worked closely with at-risk students using technology in a school district within Calgary, Alberta, Canada. These teachers had worked with secondary or adult students who faced learning barriers such as a lack of English skills, repeated failure at school, aboriginal descent, learning disabilities, and academic or developmental challenges. All teachers worked within modified programs serving learners with difficulties in learning.
Deemed as at-risk, the learners struggled with a number of barriers as mentioned above. Typically, these are students who have not successfully completed educational levels for someone because of repeated failures. The data collected were teachers’ reflection on their experience and beliefs about teaching at-risk learners using technology. Their reflection covered aspects of teaching struggling students such as technology use, reasons for success or failure, key concerns, and suggestions for best practices. Participants answered the following 5 open-ended questions with personal anecdotes relative to their experience. Qualitative data analysis was used to identify emergent themes. These emerged salient themes were extracted to answer research questions.
The survey results did were not specifically described following the three variables as shown in the beginning, but only described in categorical themes, i.e.: the learners, positive and negative outcomes, customization, blended learning, and safe learning environments. Based on the discussion, there are two major things proposed. First, using technology may bring different results for different students. Not all students really enjoy the learning activities using technology. This survey has shown a number of aspects and outcomes when using technology with struggling students. As these types of learners have different backgrounds, barriers, and learning needs, technology may be another resource to help them. Thus, teachers looking to teach and connect with at-risk learners should focus on the learners’ needs. Second, to avoid teachers who want to make use of technology, are required to selectively choose and prepare the technology. Technology-based instruction shows to have benefits for struggling learners, careful needs analysis must be taken in the design of technical venues.
Limitation of the study: (a) the number of participants is too small, so there are not conclusive or cannot be generalized. (b) no explanation on how the technology was used among the research participants, (c) there were only five interview questions used and the questions were too broad, not specific enough to get a greater depth of information, (d) the data analysis is rigorous, content analysis procedure to investigate the transcripts might be better.
This research is useful for our group project. Teachers must be open to the possibility that learners may need a different venue for their education and be prepared to offer that, as in traditional learning. Given the limitations described earlier, this study obviously facilitates us to be more aware on how to conduct qualitative research. Value of this study to ISEDP group as an example how to conduct The transcript of this data it’s the important point that we can learn from to reconstruct our research in Indonesia***agepe.
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