The Role of Hypermedia Cases on Preservice Teachers' Views of Reading Instruction
Joan E. Hughes, Becky Wai-Ling Packard, and P. David Pearson
Michigan State University
CIERA Inquiry 3: Policy and Profession
How can new teachers be initiated into the profession and provided with the knowledge and dispositions to teach young children to read well? Can hypermedia learning environments such as Reading Classroom Explorer facilitate this process?
In this paper, Hughes, Packard, and Pearson ask how the use of Reading Classroom Explorer (a hypermedia learning environment which they developed) influences beginning teachers' thinking about reading issues. Information was gathered on 14 participants (all post-BA students) in a reading education course which included use of RCE. Students' course papers were analyzed, statement by statement, to identify claims, questions, interpretations, and summaries in relation to RCE content. Participants were clustered into three groups, reflecting the degree to which they used RCE in their course papers: investors (high use of RCE, even when not required in an assignment); compliers (use of RCE when required to do so for an assignment); and resisters (low use of RCE).
The course papers were evidence, Hughes et al. argue, that involvement in an interactive learning environment such as RCE increases beginning teachers' awareness of multiple perspectives and approaches to teaching reading. However, Hughes et al. caution that the long-term impact on these teachers' classroom practice has yet to be established.
University of Michigan School of Education
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To appear in Action in Teacher Education.
Reading Classroom Explorer is available at http://reading.educ.msu.edu/rce/.
