367 Computer-Aided Instruction in Principles of Economics Texts

Principles of economics textbooks have been accompanied by a range of ancillary materials for quite some time. These instructor’s manuals, study guides, transparencies, and the like have been used in varying degrees by instructors and, no doubt, with varying de-grees of success. More recently, computerized tutorials, tests, and simulations are being provided by a large proportion of principles texts now on the market. The advent of the computerized tutorial has spawned a good deal of research into their quality and effective-ness. The impact of computer-aided instruction (CAI) on various measures of performance has been examined from many alternative viewpoints and within various disciplines. Like colleagues from other fields, economists have debated the value of CAI in the teaching of economics and have reached divergent conclusions. Sumansky (1986) has suggested the need to go beyond evaluating software in the technical sense of quality of graphics and ease of use, so that some notion of the instructional value of the software may be obtained. There have been, in fact, many studies involving the effective-ness of CAI in general and its application in the field of economics in particular. Most have focused on the ability of CAI to improve standardized test scores (e.g., Siegfried and Fels, 1979; King, 1979). In addition, Post (1985) taught a large section of 120 principles students at Iowa State University, which he divided into three groups: a control group, one that worked take-home assignments, and one that worked computer assignments and simulations. His results showed that both the take-home assignment group and the computer group did significantly better than the control group, but that there was no significant difference between the computer group and the take-home assignment group. Schenk and Silvia (1984), on the other hand, state that this coul