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Although the United States still has the most decentralized education system in the industrialized world, many states are taking a more and more active role, taking on curriculum and programmatic decisions that were formerly district and school prerogatives. In California, for example, curriculum frameworks set specific learning goals in seven content areas and suggest instructional approaches. Florida is requiring all schools to develop plans to attain specific state-mandated outcomes. In the technology area, Texas is setting standards for student and teacher workstations and is phasing in standards for weekly access time. By the end of 1995, nearly every state will have a new state technology plan, which is a requirement for participation in Goals 2000.
The justification for state planning and activity is particularly strong if technology is considered an integral part of reform because states can garner both technical resources and leverage in equipment and software purchases that would be hard for a school to duplicate. States have an important role also in striving for equity across communities with very different levels of resources.
Nevertheless, our case studies echo earlier findings in suggesting that top-down technology-based reform efforts are less effective than those that have a strong local base (e.g., Berman and McLaughlin, 1978). At John Wesley, whose district had given every school a satellite dish, the equipment sat idle, in part because teachers did not know how to download and store broadcasts so that they could use them at appropriate times during their school day, but more fundamentally because teachers had not been interested in integrating this technology in the first place. At the School of the Future, the large ILS lab that was purchased for the school by its district was spurned by the teachers in regular classes for several years; students were sent to the lab as scheduled, but the teachers did not try to draw any linkages between the ILS curriculum and what they were teaching in class, and in fact did not even know what the students were getting in their ILS lessons. These examples suggest that approaches in which a higher level of the education system decides what equipment schools will get or how they are to use it, and teachers do not participate in the process of thinking through instructional goals and selecting technologies to match them, are likely to lead to wasted resources.
At the same time, we would not advocate an entirely bottom-up approach. With no support, guidance, or encouragement from the system, a few exceptionally dedicated teachers will put in the time and energy to conceive and implement exciting technology-supported projects, at least for a while. Their students will benefit from their work and gain a new confidence in their ability to learn using technology. Most students will never receive this kind of instruction, however, if there is no systemic support for it. Innovations have a fragile existence, particularly when they are not consistent with district or state curricula and accountability measures. Without institutional support, innovations often die off when their champion leaves or becomes discouraged. One of our case study sites was clearly vulnerable to the potential loss of its technology leader; the district correctly perceived the technology as a one-person show because the technology coordinator's expertise had not been transferred to a significant number of teachers. (7)
In addition to the greater staying power of innovations supported by the broader educational system, there are significant economic and political arguments for broader-based reform efforts. Initiatives involving telecommunications technologies require larger-scale involvement by their very nature. Economies of purchasing and planning technology acquisitions argue for the involvement of state- or regional-level agencies (Council of Chief State School Officers, 1991). States also have an important role in guaranteeing equality of access. Student homes vary dramatically in the amount of technology available, and without state action, differences among schools serving advantaged and disadvantaged students are likely to reinforce such inequalities.
The model that appeared most effective across the case studies was one we have called a "mixed initiative" (Means et al., 1993), in which the higher level of the system provides a structure within which lower levels of the system are invited to design innovations that may receive funding and become part of a dissemination network (David, 1991). This philosophy is the general approach embodied at the federal level in the Goals 2000 initiative. When applied at the state level, the state takes the lead in setting an agenda for reform but recognizes the importance of local initiative and of letting classrooms and teachers "reinvent themselves." Under this model, the state's role is to create the structure for reform, but not the detailed content. The basic state strategies for encouraging local reform initiatives are:
In the technology area, more specific actions states may take include:
Under this mixed-initiative model, the state provides leadership and support but leaves the essential design and implementation issues to local control. This kind of state strategy had a significant impact on two of our case study sites. John Wesley received school restructuring funds from its state education agency, and Bay Vista became a model technology school for science. In each case, the education reform themes stressed by the state influenced the school's thinking about goals and desired activities, but the specifics of the innovation were locally determined by teacher teams, who consequently felt a strong degree of ownership. Although not directed at technology per se, the state charter school program in which Progressive participated is another example of state provision of supports for change without specification of the instructional program.
The combination of a growing activism on the part of business and civic groups and the shrinking education resources of states and districts has led to an increased recognition of the importance of forging partnerships outside the education system to promote the kinds of new programs reformers advocate. Many of our case study schools were heavily involved in such partnerships even before the rising tide of such arrangements evident in the last several years. Indeed, in assessing the degree of influence of players outside the school house, we concluded that partners outside the education system--corporations, foundations, and research groups--played a more significant role than state or local education agencies for our case study sites. The prominence of these external partners has led us to suggest, that in most cases, the education system by itself lacks the financial and technical resources for such technology-based innovations.
The importance of these external players suggests the value of federal and state policies that encourage partnerships; indeed, we have seen this trend in recent years with programs such as the Challenge Learning Grants and the New American Schools Development Corporation. Nevertheless, impediments remain in terms of the suspicion of external players (particularly business) in many quarters of the education community and the lack of awareness or interest on the part of many business partners in providing the essential human and intellectual supports for technology-supported innovations and the long-term support needed to see an ambitious change program to fruition. Just providing equipment or funding is not enough. To be effective, a partnership needs to include a shared understanding of education goals, the provision of resources for teacher training and professional development, and a commitment on both sides to working collaboratively. Our case studies included some very effective long-term partnerships with corporate or foundation partners, notably at Progressive, John Wesley, and East City High School. (See the case studies in Volume 2.)
An issue that was not fully addressed at our sites was that of sustaining the activity beyond the time frame of a partnership. Although corporations and foundations should be encouraged to engage in longer-term relationships, they cannot be expected to support any one school or group of schools indefinitely. The innovation needs to be taken over by the school and the education system, and generally there was no concrete planning for how this transition could occur. We did observe one example of a seemingly successful institutionalization of an innovation formerly supported by a corporation. After 7 years of intensive support from Apple, the Progressive School was transitioning to self-sufficiency during the 1994-95 school year. In this case, the teachers took on new duties (uncompensated), parents raised significant funds, and the school's charter provided a degree of flexibility in allocating funds that few schools enjoy. In addition, Apple provided maintenance training and interim continuation of technical assistance and other support at a decreased level during the transition year. Building a transition plan into partnerships and making plans for skill transfer and district funding at the conclusion of the special project are important considerations that are too often ignored.
From this schoolwide perspective, the five features associated with more successful implementations were:
One of the things we noticed after observing many technology-using classrooms at the case study schools was that the majority of the most interesting projects were designed by pairs of teachers or a teacher in cooperation with an outside researcher or trainer. (We will discuss the implications of this phenomenon further below.) One implication is that the kind of technology-supported education reforms being advocated needs to be supported by new policies and practices regarding teachers' time. South Creek and East City High School built in amounts of planning time for their teachers that are unusual across American K-12 institutions. Progressive had financial supports for large amounts of time outside the regular school session. Schools without such supports had a harder time getting a majority of teachers involved.
Within schools, we interviewed a great many teachers and students and observed many classrooms. From these, we selected two classrooms at each site on which to focus our data collection. Across all of the classrooms, including those visited only briefly, we drew some inferences about the features associated with successful implementations of the kind of technology-supported, project-based learning activities we were seeking.
In the classrooms within our case study schools, many of the most successful technology-supported instructional activities seem to take a middle-of-the-road approach, in which there is a curriculum package with a set of basic instructional goals and suggested activities and strategies but the teacher has (or takes) the opportunity to modify the content and fit it to his or her class and local curriculum concerns. Both the city-building and the archeological dig projects were originally conceived by people outside of our case study schools. Having heard about these project ideas, our case study teachers modified and extended them and added the use of technology tools as a way to enhance the projects. Hence, the teachers were not starting from scratch, but they had had the opportunity to be creative and to try out and refine extensions of the original curriculum unit.
Our experiences at the nine case study sites and our attempts to draw inferences for policy and practice from case study data and the existing research literature lead to some reflections on areas in which we would like to see more (or different) research.
In trying to describe technology use, one is always chasing after a moving target. Although we made an effort to select some of our sites because of their involvement with wide area networks (WANs), the timing of our case studies (most conducted during school year 1993-94, some during 1992-93) was such that the majority of schools had fairly limited access to telecommunications and participated only sporadically in a few special activities such as National Geographic Kids Network. Our case studies did provide examples of the use of Internet resources in classes at Maynard Computer Mini-School and the TeacherNet schools (see Volume 2), but other case study schools offered few opportunities to observe WAN-based activities. Nearly every one of the schools with limited WAN access during the time frame of the case studies has received (or expects to receive during 1995-96) much better network access and intends to do more in this area.
With the exceptions of some well-documented activities conducted by the AT&T Learning Circles and the collaborative science projects of Kids Network, Kids as Global Scientists, and the like, the research literature offers few examples of telecommunications projects that are rich from an instructional viewpoint. Moreover, the research literature examples were planned and structured by outside corporate or research institutions. Given the pace at which school districts and states are investing--or considering investing-in network resources for schools, there is a need for rich descriptions of exemplary teacher--designed, WAN-supported activities at a range of grade levels and in multiple content areas.
Many of our case study sites were heavily dependent on outside sources of funding, inspiration, and technical assistance. One inference that can be drawn is that the education system itself only rarely provides the level of support needed for schoolwide constructivist implementations of technology, at least in schools serving large proportions of students from low-income homes. Another, and more positive, inference is that we need to develop models for collaborative efforts to educate our children and youth. Schools and districts need more savvy in how to elicit and sustain parent, community agency, and business support. Agencies and corporations need a better understanding of schools' needs. Both sides need models for building sources of support for sustaining innovations beyond the first few years of funding.
Finally, we return to the questions that policy-makers and the public ask about technology use in schools, "Does it work? Does it raise student achievement?" One of the purposes of this report is to illustrate the reasons why there can be no straightforward, black-or-white answer to these questions. Not only are there many different technologies, but there are many ways of using any one technology. Moreover, we have argued that the essential value of the kinds of efforts we have described lies in their education reform aspects and their provision of meaningful learning activities, not the network cables or computer screens per se. It does seem clear, both from our own case studies and from previous research, that the introduction of new technology can be a very effective motivator within classrooms and that, at the school level, technology introduction can help instigate a rethinking of school purposes and structures. Moreover, we have learned a great deal about the circumstances under which technology is more likely to really take hold and become integrated within the classroom practice of large numbers of teachers.
"But does it affect student achievement?" Both because the innovations we looked at were complex, with many facets other than technology, and because of the nature of the case study approach, we are not in a position to estimate the magnitude of technology's impact on student achievement. Most of the case study sites had some positive student learning results they could point to, either higher test scores relative to schools serving comparable populations or improvement over time on a measure they felt was appropriate to their program. But the standardized test score differences were generally not large, nor could we say with any certainty that they should be attributed to technology rather than to higher motivation, better teachers, enhanced camaraderie, or more complex tasks. As we have argued earlier (Means et al., 1993), there is a need for more contextualized research in which we try out technology-supported learning activities within classrooms and not only measure their effects on student learning but also study the way in which the learning activities are implemented and the many factors that affect that implementation. A few such studies have been conducted or are now under way (see Chapter 2), and they are providing evidence that particular technology-supported activities (such as the Jasper adventures and GALAXY science episodes) can have positive effects on student performance, including classes of low-income students. Nevertheless, such results are unlikely to satisfy national or local decision-makers who want to know whether the investment in networking and computers will pay off or to compare the likely value of a technology investment with those of other school improvement options (e.g., reducing class size or rewarding effective teachers).
The research literature offers a dated but large body of empirical data from studies of drill-and-practice computer-assisted instruction (CAI) and military training videodiscs but little on the kinds of technology-supported, constructivist, student-based activities reformers advocate. More recent studies are not only few in number, as mentioned above, but also characterized by a wide variation in the kinds of technologies and constructivist learning activities studied. Thus, it will take considerable time to build up a large enough corpus to permit the kind of meta-analysis conducted for CAI studies. To even begin to provide an empirical answer to questions about technology's efficacy would require a large-scale national study of a large enough sample of technology-using and control classrooms to permit the statistical removal of other probable sources of variation in learning outcomes (Herman, 1994).
The case studies we conducted for this project suggest that when the introduction of technology is dealt with as one aspect of a broader program of school reform, it can provide an impetus for a careful reexamination of learning goals and the design and implementation of challenging learning activities. When technology-supported projects are implemented, there is a concurrent pressure to restructure the school day and year. Both because technology-supported projects tend to be more complex and because it takes time to log on to a computer, call up the appropriate software, and execute a significant piece of work, teachers soon find that they need larger blocks of time for technology-based activities. Technology encourages the development of more complex products and also an iterative process of design, execution, and refinement. This multi-stage approach has the desired effect of facilitating the acquisition of higher skill levels and metacognitive awareness or reflection, but it should be recognized that it will also create pressure to spend larger amounts of time on each learning unit. Moreover, technology-based projects almost always require teachers to break their class up into subgroups working on different activities at any one time (if for no other reason than that there is generally a limited supply of one or more of the technology resources) and at the same time encourage more collaboration among students and a less didactic role for the teacher. All of these pressures associated with the use of technology reinforce practices advocated by constructivist education reform policies. It is for these reasons, and because of public recognition of students' need for technology skills in the world of work, we expect that technology to become an essential part of schools and a force for change.
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