The effects of advance organizers existing in computer assisted instruction software on achievement of the field dependent and field independet students

This study aims to investigate the effects of advance organizers existing incomputer assisted instruction software on academic achievement of the students whohave different types of cognitive styles.The need for taking individual differences into consideration to design theinstructional environments is the first dimension of this study. Field dependent andfield independent, the most applicable cognitive styles are the focus points in theresearch. Field dependent and field independent cognitive styles, developed byWitkin, determine the learning styles of the students. In this study, the students whohad different cognitive styles were examined for their academic achievement whenthey were supplied instructional activities, which were adequate for their owncognitive styles. The effects of advance organizers, which is the most importantstrategy of Ausubel?s Meaningful Learning Theory, on the learning environments isthe second dimension of this research. The third important dimension is the relationbetween the students, having different cognitive styles and advance organizers.The integration of ICT into instruction gives the ability to create differentdesigns for the different needs of the students. For the implementation phase of thisstudy, a CAI software was developed on MS Word program for the second yearstudents, taking Introduction to Computer course.The 54 samples of the study were from the departments of Art Education andHistory Education. To determine the cognitive styles of the students, ?GroupEmbedded Figure Test? was used. According to the results of this test, the studentswere grouped into two as ?Field independent? and ?field dependent?. Then, thestudents in each group were regrouped into two to use ?the application with advanceorganizer? and ?the application without advance organizer?. Before the applicationstudent were given a pretest to determine their entry sufficiency. After three weeksinstruction the same test was used as posttest. While the students were studying in tothe software, the developed application recorded all the data in a databaseautomatically. Data were analyzed using SPSS program.The findings of the research showed that there wasn?t a significantrelationship between the academic achievement of field independent and filedindependent students after an instruction with instructional software [t=1,16, p>.05].The existence of advance organizers in a instructional software wasn?t affect the theacademic achievement of students [t=0,012, p>.05]. There was also no significantdifference between the academic achievement of field independent learners whomstudied in the computer assisted environment which was both include advanceorganizer and not include.KEYWORDS: Computer Assited Instruction, Field Dependence/FieldIndependence, cognitive style, advance organizer