Abstract:
Computer-aided instruction, while admitted by many to have great
teaching potential, has remained for most a phenomenon belonging to
the twenty-first century. The presumed necessity of expensive machines
and computers, wide-scale feasibility testing, and large quantities of
scarce technical and instructional resources has been considered to
relegate the day of practical, economical, and extensive use of computeraided
instruction in the college classroom to the distant future.
In this paper I report on a Teaching Information Processing System-
TIPS for short-which applies computers to teaching in a manner
which is not only economical and implementable-indeed, it has been
utilized at the University of Wisconsin-but which also contributes to
the effectiveness of the educational process itself. In what follows I shall
present a description of the TIPS system and report the results of an
experiment in which it was used in an economic principles course. I
will conclude with several observations on the long-run potential of
TlPS.
