provocative opinion Interactive Video Texts A "Cure" for Students with Underdeveloped Reading Skills Arnold L. Rheingold University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 Hardlv a month Dasses in this Journal without someone obsening that thestudents we teach are changing. I suspect that this has been eoine on for sometime. It has been persistent theme during my 25 years of college teaching. With consistency, the reports say that students today perform less well at comparable expectation levels than in previous vearddecadedgenerations. Some writers explain it in so&-economic terms; students are older, have family responsibilities and work parb or full-time. However, this change by most reckonings occurred nearly 50 years ago at the end of WWII with the introduction of the GI bill. Others a ~ ~ r o athe c h oroblem from the oers~ectivethat declining precollege educational expecta'tion8 are being passed on to colleges. I am sure it surprises no one that problems exist before students attend their first college chemistry lecture. After many years of teaching graduate and upper-level undereraduate courses. I recentlv returned to teachine one of our less challenging freshman courses, one semester each year.' You messed it: I found the students distinctly less able than w6en I last taught them. Their performance was a half grade-point below my previous experience. For the past three semesters, the class's average GPAhas been 2.0. About 30% of the class was doing A-B work, and a lower 70%fell in a C-F range. To determine if any common threads ran through the lower group, I used a test at the beginning of the semester to determine preparedness for college chemistry? What mattered most of all the areas examined. which also included logic, quantitative reasoning, and math skills, was reading comprehension. It alone could be reliably wrrelated with performance. The reading wmprehension questions asked the students to read paragraphs from their textbooks and answer straightforward questions about content. It wasn't loearithms or aleebra or analvtical thought that matterex just reading. Another experience. A week before a weeklv cluiz I told the students that all questions would come frbm material in the first six pages of a chapter on descriptive transitionmetal chemist&&d that they would need to read the material because I would not be l e c t u ~ g o n ibefore t the quiz.
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'The University of Delaware offerssevenlevels of freshmanchemistry to meet the diverse requirements of a state-funded university. The specificcourse I describe is the second half of a full-year course taken mostly as a requirement by students majoring in a wide range of son-tech fields. Beina the second half. those unaualified for coleliminated. "Lessbhallenaino" releae-level work have be& laraelv * ,~ lekto muse conrenr,not prolessona effort. 'A copy of th s lesl can oe oota ned from !he adtnor. No clam 1s made of any r goro-s stat~stcalana ysis of me tests res& and rhe fairly small sampling (3040students per class)would surely produce a high uncerlalnty in the results. ~
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Although only the most fundamental content of those pages appeared on the quiz, the students'performance was the worst of the semester. s students conducted by myOne-on-one i n t e ~ e w with self. lab instructors. and tuton confirmed that. eenerallv. students who did nbt do well on exams also didnot val; their textbook as a source of information and did not mutinely spend much time with it, except to work assigned Droblems. At first I blamed the book, so I changed it to one ;eputed to be better at reaching weaker students; but the results were unchanged. Although obvious now, it came to me only slowly, at the time, thac most of my students did not, or could not, view reading as an effective medium for acquiring knowledge. In contrast, those consistently in the A-B ranee spent the largest blwk of time prepari-ngfor an exam hj;eading their texts. ~Revicwingclass notes was generally second., Most re~ortedreadine the text as I had-recommended on the fust' day of class:-once before class discussion, again before exams. and a third hme before the final exam. Those rendinithis ~ o u r n aare l likely to agree with me that reading is essential to all intellertual life. and that this is so ingriined that I found it easy to condemn students who did not read effectivelv. Nonetheless. I have a class with a majority that does no"t read. ~ n l e s s ' 1can change university admission requirements, I will be faced with more in semesters to come. Fortunately, with the incredible speed with which wmputer technology advances, a solution has caught up with the problem. I have recentlv experienced some spectacular demonstrations of interactiGe, multimedia CD-ROM technology, and I think that this may be a means of reaching some of the students who are entering college in increasing numbers with underdeveloped reading habits. To determine the receptivity of my students to new computer technology, I conducted another survey, this one anonymously. I was surprised to discover that the group, which contained a majority that by some standards was not fully literate, had an extensive knowledge of, and comfort with, computers. Here are some highlights. Although my university has no computer ownership requirement, all but one said that they either owned, or had available to them where they lived, a 386-level or higher MS-DOS wmputer or Apple Macintosh of comparable power. Of those with computers, all had VGA or higher resolution color monitors. Eighty percent knew what CD-ROM was, 40% were already equipped tmostly to play interactive games, it turns out,, and all but one of those who were not e q u ~ p p ~said d they would spend $200 to install a douhle-s~eedCD-ROM drive to work-with an interactive video text: I suspect that most of these students have spent more hours in front of a video screen than I spent reading at their age. Right or wrong, they are conditioned to respond
to information on a screen, and increasingly they expect to interact with it. In the not-too-distant future, a publisher of chemistry texts will discover that for these students interactive video can provide a product superior to the orinted Dace. * As I see the video text of the future, students will be able to test themselves and be euided bv electronic tutors through problem areas. ~robLm-solvingstrategies will be developed that require active student participation, rather than passive (and pedagogically useless) inspection of full solutions. Brief video clips of dozens of chemical demonstrations could be included. Menued indexes will become major tools for organization and be hypertext linked throughout. Calculators, periodic tables, and thermochemical data used in the solutions to problems will be available at the click of a mouse button. The graphics displays will be spectacular. Basic shapes of molecules, animated orbital combinations. and bondine will be disolaved in motion along with molecular dynamics and reaction pathways. 3-D molecular structures could be assembled and rotated in real time. (Did you save those redigreen glasses fmm the 3-D movies of the 50's?) Perhaps most spectacularly, the "text" will get to know the student and select examples and modify drill according to need and past performance. Students could be asked to pmvide profiles and academic histories, and a preliminary test on basics could determine where extra work and special explanations might be helpful. In the end, every student will have a customized, individually designed text. Additionally,instructors could prepare an overlay program that will further customize "books" exactly for their needs
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31 hear rumors that some of the publishing companies are beginning to consider CD-ROM texts forchemistry,but I know of none that
has progressed to a target date.
by selecting coverage, highlighting problems and interfacing other materials such as old exams, a course syllabus, and modules &om other sources. We should take advantage of the rapidly expanding caoabilities of CD-ROM technolow. Most of the comoonent parts for creating a video textU&e off-the-shelf and software and will reauire onlv the creation of a oroduction team. We should encourage publishers when their reps visit our offices to give us video-based products that will, I think, allow us to reach and elevate the C-D stud e n t ~I. ~ suspect that this is the beginning of a revolution that oddly 411 begin with the special req;irements of our least traditionally able students, but eventually will extend to all levels of instruction and student capabilities. There has been some pioneering work in CD-ROM texts in medical fields and economics where, interestingly, production roles have been reversed. The medical experts become the consultants and the real authors are the electronicmedia experts. The cost to manufacture a CD is less than a dollar. and perhaps six CD's would replace a book, depending on how heavilv video clios were used. This is much less exoensive than &e cost of printing and binding today's texts.and six CD's cost a lot lens to ahio. These savinai would helo offset increased production costs. There is little to be .. pained in comolaininp .. about television replacing reading in the lives of an increasingly larger fraction of our students. Thpre ia even less to be zained by consciously or otherwise dumbing-down courses 6 keep up averages. Until today (literally) there was little we, as chemistry teachers, could do to reverse the trend of diminishing performance and expectations. Now that we have a ootential cure. we need to eet on with its oroduction and testing. If the traditional teit publishing houses don't do it right, the software publishers will.
Volume 71
Number 7 July 1994
581
