Alan L Tyree

Research

Major areas of research are:

Books Published

Teaching

I am primarily interested in "non-standard" methods of teaching which emphasise student autonomy. I am a great fan of the now outdated Keller Plan of teaching and many of my actual teaching methods are adapted from Keller's ideas.

Keller is often dismissed as being too "behavioural", but I believe that this misses the main point. The strengths of his teaching method are that:

Where Keller advocated the use of "proctors" I used computer assisted testing. Keller insisted that students be unable to continue until meeting a standard of "perfection", but in conformity with the less authoritarian approach of our decade I permitted students to make their own choice. See the discussion of Intellectual Property for a more complete description of methods. The CRES method of computer testing/tutoring was used in these courses.

In spite of the effectiveness of these methods, I would not advise younger staff members to attempt them. My own experience at the University of Sydney Faculty of Law was that other staff and other students are extremely hostile. It simply doesn't matter that the methods have been proved time and again to be more effective than traditional methods, they are simply too threatening for law school conservatism.

There is a small collection of on-line papers that describe my experiments with the Keller Plan and the associated testing methods.

Date: 2013-01-12 Sat

Author: Alan L Tyree

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