A certain type of guilt has been embedded within my academic personality. I credit this to my early academic training. I am tempted to compare this to religious training, but I do not want to be accused of being politically incorrect. If I become excited about something and become an advocate, there is a little voice that constantly challenges me – what evidence do you have? Sometimes I admire those who can advocate without feeling the need to justify. Taking time to establish and communicate supporting evidence slows you down and takes away some of that “cool” from presentations. Well – enough of this public examination of my personal behavior.
I encourage educators to involve their students in content-based multimedia projects. Like any activity that competes for limited classroom time, the issue of impact should be considered. As I have examined in previous posts, this perspective is typically tagged as constructivist in orientation and the efficacy of activities grouped within this category has been challenged. What about counter arguments? This is a struggle. One argument I rely on defines multimedia projects as opportunities to engage in multimedia authoring potentially allowing one to draw upon the writing to learn literature.
I must being experiencing an especially bad case of academic guilt lately because I have felt the need for further justification. From the depths of my many years of experience, I have dredged up another concept – Teaching to Learn. Multimedia authoring resembles teaching to learn – mastering a specific body of information so that you can teach it to someone else. While this argument probably resonates with anyone who teaches, cool and logical sounding ideas still do not satisfy the true test (show me the data). I remember a topic associated with Mastery Learning (a topic that intrigued me many years ago). In some mastery systems, students serve as tutors for other students and the benefits to the tutors (often in college settings) have been examined. For example, Johnson and Ruskin (1977 – note the date here – I take some satisfaction in remembering this book was on my shelf) describe a study comparing the change in GRE scores for psychology majors who did or did not serve as tutors between the occasions on which they took the GRE specialty exam in psychology. The study reported much higher gains for those who served as tutors. Processing information while or so you can help others understand it appears to be beneficial.
One caveat – your mileage many vary. More and more I am convinced that benefits come not from doing an activity, but from doing an activity well. This may speak to the limited success of many constructivist ventures and perhaps to the benefits of uninformed teaching.
Johnson, K. & Ruskin, R. (1977). Behavioral instruction: An evaluative review. Washington, DC: American Psychology Association. (Benefits to proctors is discussed on page 145.)
