Profile of the Successful Author

If you wish to use ScottNet's^® MakeMeSmart^™ tutorial program to teach and test your students' knowledge of any subject, the subject-matter content must be discrete and well-defined; not nebulous or mysterious, so ask yourself these questions:

• Can I describe in concrete terms what I expect my students to study, learn, know, and perform, e.g. specific words, phrases, idioms, sentences, conversations, stories?
• Can I teach and test this content in questions cued with text, sound, and images, whose typewritten answers students should be able to supply?
• Am I willing to give the necessary time and thought to creating a large number of presentation, exercise, and quiz questions for each learning unit, e.g. 20-200?
• Am I willing to give the necessary time and thought to an even larger number of possible, allowed responses to each question, e.g. true-false, matching, fill-in, text responses of one-word to short sentence length?
• Am I willing to create corrective feedback for incorrect student responses?
• Am I willing to collect or produce the necessary images and sounds to cue student responses?
• Am I willing to maintain this data, making corrections, additions and deletions as required?

If you can answer "Yes" to all these questions, then we should talk further.   We can quickly show you how to use our simple construction tools across the Internet.

This note to the student may further clarify how we encourage the student to approach responding to exercises and quizzes:

To the student:

1. Whenever a person asks a question, the respondent may answer in an almost infinite number of ways.
2. No one can possibly anticipate all such answers, so to limit the number of acceptable responses, the teacher provides all the possible, reasonable answers he can think of.
3. So, what's a "reasonable" answer?  Please remember that:
• Drawings and photos should focus your attention on the action or factual content of the illustration.
• Questions seek to ask very specifically about the illustrated (or strongly implied) action or factual content.
• Your answers should always respond directly to, and within the scope of, this question-picture relationship, using the cue or phrase shown. 
• The supplementary question / answer exercises provided should aid consensus on what the pictures illustrate.  --Joe Scott

© 1994, Joseph L. Scott, Ph.D., Germanic Languages & Literatures: josephlscott@hotmail.com

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