content analysis - 10/21/06

The instruction I created last week, over-all, seemed to be pretty effective. I made a paper based instructional lesson to give the student; they then had to read and work through the program themselves to learn the content—as they would be doing if the program were on the computer. The students, all of whom had never written a check or balanced a check book before, could write checks and balance a checkbook by the end of the instruction.

There were a few small oversights that were brought to my attention during the analysis. For example, the instruction starts with learning to write checks. The instruction covers what information to write on which line, but nowhere do I introduce how to write the fraction portion of the written amount, i.e. 83/100 for 83¢ or no/100 for no cense.

Some of the students reported that they felt like they learned how to do something valuable and that it was fun to choose things to buy that they wished they had.
I look forward, within the next few weeks, fixing those glitches and actually creating the site for this.