Impacto de diferentes condições de ensino no preparo de agentes educativos
Resumen
The present study investigated the effects of the training of psychology students in the
application of a software developed for teaching reading skills to children with reported
academic failure. This training was composed by teaching conditions proposed from the
elaboration of a teaching program. These conditions was developed for promoting those
children s learning, based on a technology derived from the experimental analysis of
behavior in the context special education. For the implementation of the training, the
students were presented with different suggested teaching conditions: presentation of
the exercises in the classroom; visit to the laboratory, which included a presentation of
how the computerized program works; simulation of settings in which the program was
applied; participative supervision of the participant s performance; reading of the
manual with written instructions. A follow up on the upholding of learning in the
participant s performance was also performed with no direct interference by the
experimenter (final observation). The teaching conditions were assessed in terms of the
contribution of each condition in the development of educational capabilities in the
participants, as well as in terms of possibilities of improvement of each condition. The
target behaviors (skills to be developed in the participants) were observed and recorded
in terms of occurrence, non-occurrence, or aided occurrence; a different set of
target behaviors were recorded as they occurred during the sessions of application of the
software. The results from 22 participants that were presented with the different
conditions of the training program were grouped by the 10 possible sequences of
presentation of the conditions. In general, all participants showed an increase in the
percentage of target behaviors performed, with a decrease in the percentage of
occurrence and aided occurrence recorded between the first and the last condition.
In addition, was analyzed the conditions individually (simulation, supervision and final
observation) independent of the sequence of conditions to which they were presented.
An evaluation of the teaching conditions by the participants was also used, with the
assessment of their opinion on the positive and negative aspects of the training. The
main conclusions on the relative contribution of each condition were: the simulation
condition seemed to be more efficient in reducing the frequency of non-occurrence of
the target behaviors; the supervision condition seemed to be more efficient in reducing
aided occurrence of the target behaviors; it was not possible to make inferences about
the impact of reading the manual, as participants that were not presented with this
condition had a similar performance when compared with the participants the were
presented with that condition performance of the participants was unstable, which
suggests the need for revising relevant aspects to the development of teaching
programs; the number of sessions might have played a more important role in the
participants performance than the sequence of conditions to which they were presented.
Finally, the present study raised important issues to be considered in the training of new
agents, and suggests further experiments to investigate the limitations observed.