Flexible learning in a partnership context for beginning teachers

A preliminary inventory was carried out for a sample of male and female student teachers who had email accounts. Preliminary inventory data revealed that the mean number of times per week that males used email was significantly higher than the mean number for female students. This inventory data indicated that characteristics such as gender affect Internet educational technology utilization, and this factor was addressed within the experimental design for the main study. In the main study, student teachers were assigned to four treatment groups for learning lesson-planning skills. The first two groups received a traditional university lecture followed by a seminar. For group I, the seminar was provided at university. For group 2, the seminar was provided as part of the student's school-based experiences. Groups 3 and 4 received identical tuition to groups 1 and 2 respectively, except that tuition was provided on a flexible learning basis, being delivered electronically via the Internet with tutorial support from the university lecturer by way of asynchronous email. It was found that student achievement was significantly higher when tuition was provided as part of the student's school-based experiences, and also that achievement was significantly higher when tuition was provided on a flexible learning basis involving computermediated communications. A separate AN OVA was carried out for the entire sample of the four treatment groups in order to address the factor of student gender, which was controlled in the experiment. However, there were no significant differences in achievement associated with student gender. This surprising finding suggests that although male. students may make greater usage of information technology, when required to do so, female students perform on a par with their male counterparts.