April 2005 — Features

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Using Mindtools in Education

By Denise S. Averill, River Vale Public Schools, N.J.

Conclusion

How teachers can properly assess their students while keeping standards high is a problem that will continue to be faced in the years to come. With the advent of the computer, and properly integrating the computer into a classroom setting, assessing students can now be done in a variety of ways.

Assessment used to be done with paper and pencil, now those same rubrics have gone online. Students’ ease of comfort with the computer is prevalent, and that should be foremost in a teacher’s mind. When educators combine both elements (traditional methods and using technology) in their teaching, new benefits arise for the teacher and the student.

8 Reasons for Using Mindtools in Education

  1. Educational Reasons. With the use of mindtools, the teacher is able to perform lower-level operations that enable the learner to devote more time to meaningful mental processes. The teacher and student provide the intelligence, not the computer. It is best to learn with the computer and not from it because more responsibility is placed on the student, who becomes a more self-reliant thinker and problem-solver. These mindtools also help students transcend mental limitations such as memory, giving them the opportunity to see their work and ask more questions.
  2. Theoretical Reasons. Mindtools facilitate knowledge construction in which students organize and represent what they know. Mindtools also engage learners in reflective thinking, which leads to knowledge construction and the extension of constructivism. The student can then construct his or her own knowledge when building an external or sharable product such as a hypermedia computer project.
  3. Practical Reasons. A lack of available software, cost and efficiency are reasons for using mindtools. Computer-assisted instruction materials only cover a fraction of the curricula; then, there is the cost issue. When purchasing even just a few computer-assisted instructional programs, many school districts opt out due to the great expense. The use of these mindtools is more time-efficient because less time is spent learning to use different programs.
  4. Pedagogical Criteria for Evaluating Mindtools. All mindtool applications can be used in assessing a student's progress. Mindtools often yield many solutions and involve multiple, sometimes conflicting, criteria. Mindtools also require considerable mental effort, so the student is compelled to make elaborations and judgments.
  5. Critical Thinking Skills. Critical thinking is the dynamic reorganization of knowledge in meaningful, usable ways. It involves making judgments, measuring against a standard, as well as assessing reliability and usefulness. When separating a whole lesson by using mindtools, a student is able to understand the relationships of the lesson (recognizing patterns, categorization and sequencing, as well as being able to identify assumptions and main ideas) and can compare, contrast, think logically, make inferences from data, identify causal relationships, and predict outcomes.
  6. Creative Thinking Skills. Creative thinking is closely related to critical thinking. Creativity requires going beyond accepted knowledge to generate new knowledge. This involves the following mental processes: A student is able to summarize main ideas into his or her own words. Through mindtools, students can also hypothesize, process information, express ideas fluently, predict outcomes while wondering, use their intuition, and add personal meaning.