Computer technology is soaring in the 1990s as the need for computer literacy to be part of the educational curriculum. Computer teaching offers an improved instructional situation for the student and the teacher; it also prepares the student for entry into future proficient levels of productive employment and societal interaction. Teaching math by computer is essential to meet current needs such as increased numbers of remedial math students, and computer literacy requirements for advanced courses. This transformation will be met with resistance. The change process can be managed with an understanding and controlling of factors such as personal attitudes and beliefs and change principles. Specific instrumental changes are needed to facilitate transformational changes.
Computer technology exists as does its striking potential for transforming classroom learning. The employment of technology in instruction is being implemented in colleges and universities around the country; it is found to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness within the instructional experience. It also provides authoring, networking and database technologies which lend support for instruction that can be more faculty-guided, learner-paced and more individualized than instruction in a traditional classroom. With technology-mediated instruction, learning and assessment are viewed as helping students to learn more proficiently with an increase in academic achievement.
Students frequently arrive underprepared for college-level studies. Mathematics studies offer an example of this prevalent problem. A survey of enrollment trends in mathematics courses (by the Mathematical Association of America), shows a rapid increase of enrollment of students placed in remedial and developmental courses. Between the fall of 1970 and that of 1990, enrollment in remedial mathematics courses increased almost three times faster that of enro...