Graduate Student Teaching with Technology

Integrating Teaching and Technology: Facilitating Student-Centered Teaching for Graduate Students at a Research University

This study sought to understand how participants of the Teaching with Technology program at Northwestern University conceive of the relationship among teaching, learning, and technology, and how these conceptions can be developed and enhanced.

Aravamudan, N., Calkins, S., Schuller, M., & Rubel, D. (2008). Integrating teaching and technology: Facilitating student-centered teaching for graduate students at a research university. The Journal of Graduate and Professional Student Development.

Integrating Teaching and Technology: Facilitating Student-Centered Teaching for Graduate Students at a Research University

This study examined the following questions:

• How do graduate students experience and use technology in their teaching?
• How do teaching, learning, and technology intersect?
• What is the impact of a teaching-with-technology program on participants' conceptions of teaching, learning, and technology?

This study rests on the assumption that technology does not inherently increase student engagement or learning, but that it is how technology is used in particular learning contexts that matters most. We offer a model that measures change along two dimensions: the approach-to-teaching dimension (in which the focus of instruction is teacher-centered or learner-centered) and the technology-usage dimension (in which the focus of technology is content-oriented or process-oriented). A teacher-centered approach emphasizes information transmission while a learner-centered approach emphasizes conceptual change. A content-oriented approach to using technology mainly uses technology to add content to the course or to improve organization and administration, while a process-oriented approach uses technology to promote interaction with material and/or other students. We then use a small sample to show how our model can be used to measure effectiveness of similar programs.