Technical Research for Improving Web-Based Instructional Artifacts

Abstract

Teachers integrate Web-based materials into instruction in a variety of ways.  They can promote specific learning strategies, organizational skills, curricular content, and many other dimensions of the instructor’s pedagogical beliefs and practice. Where a classical experimental research paradigm can help isolate and predict the effect of such factors, it is less useful for fine-tuning the use of Web-based materials to an individual instructor’s needs. This chapter advocates the methodology of technical action research to examine the pedagogy reflected in the Web-based constructs, or “artifacts,” in use in the instructional setting.  Guided by the instructor’s espoused beliefs, incremental improvements can be made to the design and use of these Web-based artifacts.