Students valuation of the use of computers in education

Two schools for general secondary education in Enschede, The Netherlands took part in a 4-yr Technology-enriched Schools project. One of the research questions in this project was the valuation by the students of the use of computers in education. It was hypothesized that this valuation would be influenced by factors which deal with the perception of the student, the use of computers in teachinglearning situations, the circumstances in which the computers are used, and background information on the students. It was also hypothesized that the frequent use of computers in education could make the students less enthusiastic about computers.\ud \ud The research questions were investigated by means of two instruments with identical content: a paper-and-pencil questionnaire and a computerized questionnaire. The questionnaire was administered to 816 students. About 20% of the students had had considerable experience with computers outside of school-hours.\ud \ud Results show that some students had used the computer at school very frequently. There was no evidence found in this study that students with much computer experience at school valued the use of computers in education differently than did students who had little experience. The intensity with which the computers were used by the teachers of the technology-enriched schools did not have a restraining influence on the enthusiasm and the motivation of the students

Computer science in Dutch secondary education: independent or integrated?

Nowadays, in Dutch secondary education, computer science is integrated within school subjects. About ten years ago computer science was considered an independent subject, but in the mid-1980s this idea changed. In our study we investigated whether the objectives of teaching computer science as an independent subject are met when computer science is integrated within school subjects. The main problem was that there was no formal curriculum of computer science as an independent subject. Therefore we interviewed 13 experts in the field of computer science and then compared this formal curriculum with the operational (integrated) curriculum, which is still in the development stage. It appears that most of the components of the formal curriculum are being covered by the operational curriculum, and we therefore concluded that these curricula are equivalent, although there may be differences in the level of teaching. In our opinion the best approach to computer science is to combine the independent and the integrated approaches