The continuous inventions and evolutions in all information technology fields open new channels and opportunities to enhance teaching and educational methods. In one side, those may improve the abilities of educators to present information in an interactive and media enhanced formats relative to traditional methods. This may help students or learners through offering them the information in channels and methods that can be easier to understand, deal with, and retrieve. On the other hand, offering those alternative methods of teaching can be helpful particularly for children, people with special needs, or students in rural areas where they can have virtual or remote instructors especially for majors that have shortages. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of utilizing multimedia technologies on enhancing, or not, the effectiveness of teaching students at early stages in Jordanian primary schools. To achieve this objective a program is developed to test the students' abilities to understand mathematical basic knowledge and skills. Two groups are selected from a local school based on their own class distribution where one group was taught the subject in basic math using a program developed for this purpose. The second class was taught the same subject using traditional methods of teaching (i.e. direct student to child instruction, board, etc.). Results showed that in such math skills at this age, using programs or multimedia enhanced methods of teaching can be effective in getting students attention especially when cartoon characters are used. Results also showed that there is no significant difference in learning and knowledge skills and information absorption based on gender distribution where results comparison between little boys and girls showed no significant difference in their learning skills.
REF developed a study to investigate the impact of the use of multimedia technologies in improving or not improving the teaching effectiveness of students in early stages in primary schools in Jordan.
Studying the Impact of Using Multimedia Interactive Programs at Children Ability to Learn Basic Math Skills.
E-learning and Digital Media
Computer Science