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Create Traces of Student Thinking Processes--Collins, Hawkins, and Frederiksen (1991) assert that appropriate technologies have a strong role to play in tracking the process of learning and thinking by (1) recording how students learn with feedback in novel situations; (2) recording students' thinking and strategic processes by tracing the process with which students maneuver through a problem or task; and (3) recording students' abilities to deal with realistic situations.
Earlier technology (The Voyage of the Mimi is an example) did not have built-in ways to monitor or track students' progress, making it difficult for teachers to follow the actual learning process, especially for students with learning difficulties (Hawkins and Sheingold, 1985; Morocco and Dalton, 1990). To assess student learning of navigation skills for the Mimi cases, Education Development Corporation designed a hands-on "performance assessment"--placing students individually at the computer with a researcher who took on the role of clinical interviewer as the student played the navigation game individually (it is usually played collaboratively with other students). This approach is one model for teacher assessment of individual student learning in a computer-based environment.
An alternative approach is made possible by recent software environments that have the capability to gather a "dribble file" of all of the student's activity in the environment. This file can be placed in a student's portfolio along with the student's visual and writing products. The teacher can examine the file to discern the blind alleys, alternative designs, and way of proceeding that characterized the student's efforts.
Moreover, the increased visibility of work on a computer screen increases the likelihood that teachers will engage in informal, ongoing assessment as students are working (Morocco, Dalton, and Tivnan, 1989; 1992). Hawkins and Sheingold (1985) found that teachers noticed more about the way their students were learning as they circulated among students working at computers.
Video technologies provide another means for recording and tracking student learning processes. For example, teachers at Skyline Elementary, a Model Technology School in California, have used video equipment (a MicroMacro Lab with table-mounted cameras attached to widescreen video) as a tool for observing and analyzing the strategies used by young children engaged in mathematical problem solving with manipulatives.
Provide Contexts for Authentic Assessment--Technology can be used to present authentic tasks in a standardized manner, thus providing a context for assessing advanced skills. Each video episode in SRI's Becoming Successful Problem Solvers series, for example, presents two child actors engaged in an extended effort to solve an interesting, real-life mathematical problem. Accompanying the episodes are paper-and-pencil instruments and open-ended questions to help teachers get at students' beliefs about problems (e.g., Can there be more than one right answer?).
Store and Retrieve Student Work and Associated Comments--The issue of assessing and meeting individual student needs in a simulated environment, where students are constructing knowledge over time through a variety of experiences, was a critical one in the immigration project described earlier (Walters and Gardner, 1991). In a revised version of Immigrant 1850, researchers included an extensive chapter on how to assess student writing by providing guidelines for assessment along with samples of student work to exemplify those guidelines, including drafts and plans, as well as final products, commentary, and reflection.
Set Goals and Manage Instruction--Teaching involves a great deal of management of student instructional goals and performance records, especially when instruction is individualized. One of the biggest draws for integrated learning systems (ILS) has been their inclusion of software to automate this process. Although the discrete-skills approach embedded in most such systems is not easily incorporated within an interdisciplinary project-based approach, technology can support more adaptive strategies for managing and documenting student learning. At the Saturn School in St. Paul, teachers collaborated with software developers to design technology to respond to, store, and manipulate complex student performance data. The system was designed to keep track of individual student Personal Growth Plans, consisting of goals negotiated with staff and parents but written in the student's own words (Bennett and King, 1991). This plan can be stored on both teacher- and student-accessible networks, where students and teachers can set goals and track student accomplishments. The student or teacher can query the system for learning activities (e.g., courses, workshops, community volunteer opportunities, mentorship programs) relevant to a particular goal. There are pop-up windows for teacher comments and notes regarding the student's activities and goals. The student's portfolio may include both hard copy and items that are stored electronically on the network, including text files, HyperCard stacks, and videos.
Interaction with Colleagues--The opportunity for teachers to work cooperatively with other teachers is considered a crucial program ingredient in the AT&T Learning Network described previously. Beyond providing an avenue for communication about cooperative projects, the AT&T Learning Network provides a forum for more in-depth and reflective communication between professionals. Riel (1990b) found that teachers who were part of the AT&T learning circles asked each other for suggestions and advice and thus gained new ideas about classroom organization and teaching practices. Indeed, when the teachers participating in the AT&T Learning Network were asked about the benefits of educational electronic networking, most rated their own learning, not the learning of their students, as the most important benefit of the program (Riel, 1990b).
The Teaching Teleapprenticeship program explores several models for improving the preparation of teachers (Levin, Waugh, Brown, and Clift, 1993). Teacher education students receive hands-on opportunities to explore collaborative learning models through direct participation in a wide variety of electronic network-based learning experiences. One type of teleapprenticeship involves teacher education students in many diverse, instructional contexts; another apprentices candidates with practicing teachers. Yet another type involves candidates in mentoring activities with K-12 apprentices from participating classrooms.
Access to Subject Matter Experts and Resources--In addition to providing links to colleagues, technology can give teachers access to experts and learning resources in the subject matter they are trying to teach. Even the best-prepared teacher cannot know everything in a given field, and knowledge about new developments is by definition vested in just a few individuals. The Urban Math Collaborative (UMC) links teachers and university mathematicians. Discussions on the electronic network of the UMC have deepened teachers' content knowledge and have also touched on teaching issues that do not get dealt with as openly and meaningfully in other forums (Driscoll and Kelemanik, 1991).
In addition, a number of network-based projects are being developed to support teachers' professional development. The National Teacher Enhancement Network (NTEN) delivers on-line graduate credit courses through the University of Michigan for high school science teachers nationally and internationally. In California, the Telemation Project trains telementors, who in turn train other teachers in the use of network technology for communication, resource access, and curriculum development. Teachers learn to use Internet browsers such as Netscape and Mosaic to search for resources on the World Wide Web. Other projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Project and California On-Line Resources in Education (CORE), connect teachers to Internet resources.
Teachers contemplating the above set of issues might well ask themselves whether their involvement with technology will be worth the trouble. The response from thousands of teachers who have tried it would be a resounding "yes!"
Increasingly, wide area networks are providing interested groups of teachers with information about new technology applications and curriculum approaches. Although useful, access to these resources does not fill all of teachers' needs for technical support, nor does it necessarily provide them with an efficient way to assess the potential power of each technology application with respect to inquiry-based teaching and learning. Driscoll and Kelemanik (1991) have found that it is very difficult for teachers to sustain regular, substantive discussions on a network. The discontinuity in conversation can be a big disadvantage because if some questions go unanswered, a request is ignored, or interesting lines of discussion are not pursued, the conversation may falter and users may drop out. Riel (1990a) has found that the use of bulletin boards is very time-consuming and that it is sometimes inefficient for teachers to negotiate their way through them in search of applicable and appropriate ideas or conversations.
Any technology integration requires that teachers engage in rethinking and reshaping their curriculum. Teachers should pose questions such as: What does the technology offer my students in terms of developing concepts and content? How does it help them to carry out inquiry processes? How will they work together collaboratively or cooperatively? What is the relationship between the technology and other instructional materials? What knowledge, processes, and skills do students need before using the technology? What new knowledge of my content or discipline, of teaching, or of technology do I need in order to foster new learning in my students?
Taking on New Roles--Although teacher-designed inquiry environments can have enormous motivating power for students, they require advanced skills--in curriculum and instruction, in team building and interdisciplinary curriculum design, as well as in technology--on the part of the teacher. When teachers use and develop inquiry-based curricula that integrate technology, their role in the classroom becomes more that of a coach or facilitator of student learning. For teachers and students to follow multiple routes to knowledge-making, a curriculum needs to be flexible. Teachers cannot--and should not expect to--have a total grasp of the content related to every topic. What they do need to know is how to help guide students through the meaning-making process. Teachers often feel vulnerable as they take the risk of shifting from a more comfortable knowledge transmission mode of teaching to inquiry-based teaching.
Responding to Individual Students--Many technology applications (e.g., word processing, databases) offer teachers a window into the student's thinking, inquiry, and problem-solving processes. When the work students are doing is visible on a monitor or printout, teachers have access to students' misconceptions, the ways in which they sort and categorize information, the relationships they form among ideas, and the conjectures they make. Teachers need good diagnostic skills to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the technology, however. Good judgment about when and how much to intervene is important, also. Intervention in students' work at an early stage can be helpful, but it also can thwart students, short-circuiting their own construction of knowledge (Newman, 1990; 1992). A challenge related to the collaborative learning approach used in many technology-supported projects is finding a balance between group and individual assessments. The essence of a collaborative project suggests an emphasis on evaluating group performance, but teachers also need to tease out enough evidence of individual performance to be able to identify any students who have become lost in the dynamics of the group.
Computer-Assisted Instruction--Meta-analyses of studies at the elementary school (Kulik, Kulik, and Bangert-Drowns, 1984; Niemiec and Walberg, 1985) and secondary school (Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, and Kulik, 1985; Kulik, Bangert, and Williams, 1983; Samson, Niemiec, Weinstein, and Walberg, 1986) levels generally show a significant advantage for computer-assisted instruction. The relative advantage of computer-assisted instruction in these reports appears stronger for disadvantaged and low-ability students (Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, and Kulik, 1985; Samson et al., 1986) and for males (Niemiec and Walberg, 1985). When Clark (1985) reexamined samples of the studies included in earlier meta-analyses, however, he found that effect sizes were much smaller when the same teacher provided instruction in both treatment and comparison groups and were absent when instructional method was controlled (such that the study measured the effect of instructional delivery medium only). Effects were larger in shorter-term studies, suggesting that novelty effects boost performance with new technologies in the short term but tend to wear off over time.
Videodisc and Multimedia Technologies--Advantages of interactive videodisc over lectures have been reported (e.g., Nelson, Watson, and Busch, 1989). Fletcher (1990) conducted a meta-analysis of 47 studies comparing instruction via computer-controlled interactive videodisc (IVD) with conventional instruction in military training, industrial training, and higher education settings. On average, those who learned through IVD had achievement scores that were .50 standard deviation higher than those of students taught conventionally.
Constructivist Uses of Technology--The technology applications tested in the above studies were a far cry from the kinds of student-centered uses of technology most education reformers advocate. The empirical research comparing more constructivist technology interventions with conventional classrooms is much newer and more sparse, but there are some promising findings.
The Jasper series described above was evaluated during its experimental use in 52 classes in 9 states (Pellegrino et al., 1992). Classrooms using Jasper videodiscs (after 2 weeks of teacher training) showed significantly better performance than classrooms matched on demographic characteristics in terms of students' mathematical concept attainment, attitudes toward mathematics, and ability to plan their problem solving (Pellegrino et al., 1992).
Similarly, Project GALAXY found significantly higher performance in GALAXY classrooms on a variety of measures of scientific reasoning and problem solving. An evaluation of the science grade 3-5 curriculum in 15 GALAXY schools found that students in GALAXY classrooms gained twice as much as comparison students on performance assessments of classification skill and outscored the comparison group on two of four tasks involving experimentation. In GALAXY classrooms, students also appeared more skilled at working together in small groups, and teachers reported that they have more confidence in their ability to teach science and that more time was spent on science (Guth, Austin, Long, and Pasta, 1994).
Several studies have found positive effects of having students develop their own curriculum materials using hypermedia. When asked to draw "concept maps" of the Enlightenment, 11th-grade history students who had studied the period using a hypermedia corpus called ACCESS (American Culture in Context: Enrichment for Secondary Schools) had more information within their maps and used more abstract concepts to organize the information they had than did their peers who had not used the hypermedia materials (Spoehr, 1992). Similarly, Lehrer found that when ninth-grade students were retested a year after they had studied the Civil War, those who had developed hypermedia presentations had a more realistic understanding of the role of the historian, recalled more Civil War facts, and had more elaborated concepts (Lehrer, Erickson, and Connell, 1992).
On the dependent-variable side, issues can be equally thorny. Many studies, particularly those examining longer interventions, compare treatments in terms of outcomes on standardized tests, but these multiple-choice measures of basic skills may not measure the problem-solving processes and alternative interpretations emphasized in project-based technology programs. Equally biased are studies administering measures specially designed around the particular content and presentation format used in their technology project (Samson, Niemiec, Weinstein, and Walberg, 1986). Therefore, comparative studies are being superseded by more elaborate approaches, as discussed below.
For example, to study the effects of a program to help students develop a "community of learners" and create part of their own curriculum, Ann Brown and her colleagues found significant improvement on standard pretest and posttest measures (Brown, Ash, Rutherford, Nakagawa, Gordon, and Campione, in press). In addition, however, Brown et al. conduct detailed case studies on the conceptual growth of individual students in order to understand and to illustrate the factors that appear to be responsible for the observed gains.
Similarly, Riel (1989) coupled observations of students in a project involving an on-line "newswire" service and production of a student newspaper with data from their reading and writing test scores. Riel's observations led her to conclude that the experience of editing others' writing produces more improvement than does practice correcting one's own mistakes and that students are reluctant to edit the work of their classmates but much freer to criticize and correct the work of a distant peer.
To determine the extent to which students of different ability levels participated in their Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environment (CSILE), researchers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education found that students at all ability levels were involved equally and interacted effectively with CSILE, with particularly strong effects among the lower- and middle-ability groups (Bryson and Scardamalia, 1991).
It should be noted that these contextualized studies, which provide much more detail than is summarized here, seek to understand the complex interplay between an innovation, which is itself an amalgamation of many instructional features, and the particular culture of a classroom or characteristics of individual students. Such studies help us understand not just the effects that technology use can have on student learning but also the classroom implementation environment needed to realize technology's potential.
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[Study Aims, Questions, and Methodology]