Final Reading (#3)

A considerable amount of research has been undertaken in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Israel on gender and attitudes toward educational uses of computers. Findings from these studies are generally quite consistent regardless of the nationality of students and teachers. Most researchers report that girls have more negative attitudes towards computing than boys. However, this does not mean that the girls' attitudes toward computers are negative in an absolute sense nor that boys' and girls' attitudes are radically different. However, the author thinks that it is more accurate to say that most boys and girls have positive attitudes toward computing, with the girls' attitudes being somewhat less positive than those of boys.

In the past, the education system in many countries war doubted and unacceptable. The teachers’ performances were marked as the low quality. During the time, the education in the nations has been developed and the schools have been given the pressure to be accomplished. More curriculums such as “computer literacy” have been integrated to the classrooms, in the school day. This may have even greater implications for women teachers. The curriculum on a chart was created to help teacher with overload schedules. As the author mentioned, the "curriculum on a cart" solution tends to be a generalized response to the demands of new curriculum projects in many schools, especially since other responses would require more money, something we cannot expect in times of the fiscal crisis of the state.

Many people believe that for students to learn, teachers must instruct, by which it is meant that learning depends on a teacher who correctly sequences curriculum content, drills students on correct performance, corrects mistakes, and then tests for achievement. On a daily level, children encounter problems of all sorts: logical, mathematical, physical, social, ethical. Problems require solutions. Thus the child strives toward a more comprehensive, more adequate, means of resolving problems, of synthesizing disparate ideas, of making sense of the world. Constructivist education, therefore, centrally involves experimentation and problem solving, and student confusion and mistakes are not antithetical to learning, but a basis for it.