Who Should Control the Interactivity of Instruction?--Issues in Learner Control

[[abstract]]The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the type of in-structional control (program vs. learner) In a CAI sequence on task performance, self-efficacy, attitudes, and time on task during procedural learning. The investigation also included an examination of the impact of academic ability and gender on the variables described above. Two major issues guided this investigation: 1)The effects of control with respect to the composite of outcome variables including post-test performance, self-efficacy, attitudes and time on task; and 2) differences in students' performance score and instructional time on task after accounting for sub-jects' academic ability and gender. The results of the analyses showed a signifijects'-cant difference between the learner-and program-control group with respect to the composite dependent variables of performance, score, pre-and post-instruction self-efficacy, attitudes and time on task (p<.001). Follow-up analyses each revealed a significant difference between the two groups on performance score ( p <.05) and time on task (p<.001) indicating that learner-control group demonstrated superior performance and used more time for instruction than the program control group. Separate 2X2X2 ANOVAs were also conducted for the performance score and time on task. The results of the analyses for the performance score re-sulted in a significant main effect of the gender (p<.05) and 3-way interaction (group X academic ability X gender) (p<.05). Follow-up analyses indicated that females outperformed males and that high academic-ability males under the learner control performed best among all gender-ability combination groups and high academic-ability males under the program control performed poorest ar.iong all gender-ability combinations. All high ability subjects performed best under learner-control instruction. As to time on trsk, only a main effect of group was obtained (p<.001) replicating the earlier results that the learner control group took more time during the instruction than the program control