The study was published in December in the journal Exceptional Children.
"As we prepare our students to become the most effective teachers they can be, we continue to research the most effective teaching methods and utilize them in our own teaching," said lead researcher Michael Kennedy, an assistant professor at the Curry School, reported Physorg.
The multimedia-based instructional tool, called a content acquisition podcast, or CAP, is a short, multimedia-based instructional vignette that provides focused instruction for a specific topic of interest. Questions can be embedded within each CAP that make them more interactive than a text-based lesson, and also provide feedback to the learner — and instructor — on the user's performance.
The specific lesson this study reviewed covered a method of measurement well-known in the special education field called Curriculum-Based Measurement, which allows teachers to test and graph a student's performance on a particular competency — for example, a student's ability to read aloud — over time.
"Curriculum-Based Measurement is a topic and skill teachers definitely need to know about," Kennedy said. "But it has a lot of moving parts and can be a little tricky. We wanted to create and test a Web-based lesson that could give teacher candidates a first glimpse into the measurement, learn key terminology, see some examples, and learn how it works."
In the study, 270 teacher education candidates from the University of Virginia, Anderson University and Augsburg College were randomly assigned to either watch the CAP or read an article written specifically for teachers on Curriculum-Based Measurement — the latter being the most common form of instruction used in education schools. The CAP is about 25 minutes, whereas the group that read had unlimited time.