Education

The Wonks: Technology Does, and Doesn't, Boost Learning

by Clay Burell

category: Education And Technology

Published June 21, 2009 @ 02:42PM PT

I've been meaning to share this one for a while. It offers a good chuckle at the expense of ed wonks. It comes at the very end of the panel discussion at the Brookings Institute last month that followed Arne Duncan's brief appearance. As you'll see from the transcript below, a woman asks a question about training teachers to use technology effectively to enhance classroom learning. The first expert - kill me for not wading through the hour plus video to get names, or kill the transcriber for not including them and instead just calling them "SPEAKER" - basically pooh-poohs the idea that technology can enhance learning, and cites the inevitable study to support his case:

SPEAKER: Well, I can respond a bit to that. The Institute of Education and Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education carried out a large scale study of leading technology products that are used in classrooms to boost reading and math scores found no difference in outcomes for students in classrooms randomly assigned to receive those products versus carry out business as usual.

The developers of those products protested and they said that, well, if the teachers had only used and the students had only used these products for the number of hours intended, they would have worked much better. In fact, it was a study of normal conditions of use and technology in the school.

I think the nation has a frontier in front of it in understanding how to apply new technology to teaching and learning, but I think the results we have in hand suggest that it is a frontier we need to get to rather than a location at which we presently sit. So it's promise and potential, and I expect that some of the stimulus money at the local level, when it gets there, is likely to be used to invest in technology because the machines and the software remain after the stimulus funds are expended.

Let's stop there for a second and parse the language: This wonk seems to conceive of educational technology as "educational products" to "boost reading and math scores" - technology for the sake of test prep, produced as canned software by commercial companies. Digital drill and kill, in essence. It's a remarkably impoverished, 1990s view of technology in education. Yet this view is espoused by a Brookings expert.

The irony comes when the next speaker disagrees completely with the last, and cites different studies to back up his position:

[DIFFERENT] SPEAKER: I'll suggest a little bit different slant on this. My own instinct is that over the next eight to ten years, the biggest changes in the schools will come through technology. I think the ­ I actually think that the economic downturn is going to contribute to that in many ways.

From another body of data, if you look at courses, that is, full courses, often that are now used in many cases for credit recovery, which is often associated with small schools, students ­ they only give biology once every two years, and if a student flunks biology the first year and does not ­ have a chance to take it until senior year and they want to take chemistry later in the senior year, they take a credit recovery course, they take it with technology. These are pretty weak courses in many cases, but the results from them suggest that they are just as weak or as strong as the conventional teacher.

And so we have a long body of research over the last ten or 15 years which indicates that there's no significant difference between the ­ taking the course from a piece of technology, the full course, or taking it from the teacher itself.

Now, that's changing, in fact, it's tipping the other way, and what you're finding in the new technology, in the new courses that are being developed, are very, very high quality materials, with feedback loops in them that give ­ that allow for adaptive instruction, that is, a student is working through this course, they take a little assessment, find the course itself, the technology discovers that the student isn't doing so well, so it cycles it back through the material again, or it gives it another piece of  material that may teach the concept in a different way.

Just very quick, Carnegie Melon University, and this is ­ working with freshman and sophomores, so they're very close to high schools, they did a study of a piece of technology like this, what they call a cognitive tutor, and they compared random samples, just a classroom against another classroom, a random sample of students.

The sample of students who took only the technology were only given half the time, they were only given half the semester to take it, and so they took it under their own control, their own speed, they took exactly the same hour exams, exactly the same final exam as the other students, and they did better than the other students. Not only did they do better, they did it faster, obviously. So we're challenging both the idea of a semester and the course load in a semester, as well as do you actually need a lecturer who's going to pace it for you.

Re: that underlined part: I'll have more to say on that in a follow-up post about my own experience of taking Yale's Open Courseware Jewish Bible class by downloading a full semester of lectures and readings, and watching them at my own pace.