A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

Technology and Education Reform: Technical Research Report - August 1995

Executive Summary

Educational reform calls for a shift away from organizing instruction around short blocks of time devoted to lecture or practicing discrete skills in specific academic disciplines toward an emphasis on engaging students in long-term, meaningful projects. It is well documented that technology can enhance student acquisition of discrete skills through drill and practice. This study addresses the question of whether technology can provide significant support for constructivist, project-based teaching and learning approaches and the associated issue of the elements needed for an effective implementation of technology within an educational reform context.

Case studies of nine sites that have been using technology in ways that enhance a restructuring of the classroom around students' needs and project-based activities form the centerpiece of the project. In selecting schools for study, we gave priority to sites that have emphasized education reform (rather than technology for its own sake) and that provide challenging, authentic activities for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Eight individual schools and one network of 462 schools constituted the case study sample.

The Vision: Technology-Supported Constructivist Classrooms

The model of constructivist teaching that motivated our research design has student involvement in complex, meaningful tasks or projects at its core. Once a commitment is made to structuring the classroom around such projects, nearly every other aspect of pedagogy must change as well. Projects with real-world relevance will nearly always be multifaceted, incorporating both higher-order skills, such as design, composition, and analysis, and more basic skills, such as the mechanics of writing. They will also nearly always be multidisciplinary in nature and will require extended periods of time to complete. The very complexity of the task will make it advantageous to have students work on them in groups, resulting in a greater emphasis on teamwork and collaborative skills. Heterogeneous roles will tend to emerge as students tackle different portions of the project. Teachers will design the overall structure for project activities and provide the resources that students need to do them, but students will have much more responsibility for their own learning and for producing finished products that meet high standards. Teachers will function as roving coaches, helping individual students or groups over rough spots and capitalizing on the "teachable moment" within the context of the students' engagement in their work. In short, when instruction is organized around complex, authentic projects, there are strong pressures to break away from the discrete academic disciplines, repetitive drill, short periods of instruction, and teacher-led lessons that have been the hallmarks of American education for so many years.

Effects of Using Technology

In our search for appropriate case study sites and in the field research that followed, we found that it is not easy for teachers to implement the reform vision described above. Constructivist, project-based teaching and learning make severe demands on teachers, and adding technology to the mix, at least initially, adds to the intellectual and logistical burdens. Nevertheless, there were teachers at our case study schools whose classrooms demonstrated what can be done when technology and carefully designed project-based activities are used in concert. The teachers we studied who were involving their students in long-term, complex projects supported by technology found that technology supported their efforts by:

Adding to the students' perception that their work is authentic and important. Students evidenced greater concern about the quality of their technology-supported work, giving more consideration to how it could be perceived by external audiences.
Increasing the complexity with which students can deal successfully. Teachers were often surprised not only by how quickly their students learned to use new hardware and software but also by how much farther they could go in specific subject areas when given technology supports. Technology can both automate mundane, repetitive portions of a task and support visualizing and presenting more essential, abstract elements.
Dramatically enhancing student motivation and self-esteem. Case study teachers were nearly universal in citing the positive effects of technology on student motivation. Using technology increased the amount of time students spent on a task, their willingness to critically review and revise their work, and their pride in the finished product.
Making obvious the need for longer blocks of time. When students used technology to support their project work, it became clear that time for working on project activities needs to be extensive enough so that students can get access to their work files, make significant progress, and then store them for future work.
Creating a multiplicity of roles,leading to student specialization in different aspects of technology use. Given the ever-changing array of technology capabilities, students found a wide range of potential specialties ranging from creating hypertext links to navigating the Internet to videoediting to computer graphics. Each of these roles is valuable in a complex project, and students who had not excelled in more conventional academic settings often shone in one or more of these roles.
Instigating greater collaboration, with students helping peers and sometimes their teachers. Working side by side on technology-based tasks, students exhibited a tendency to seek advice and offer it to each other. Teachers reported that a collaborative ethic emerged that often spilled over into non-technology-based activities.
Giving teachers additional impetus to take on a coaching and advisory role. When students were actively engaged with technology, the teacher had less need to be giving the whole class information or acting as disciplinarian. Instead, the teacher became a roving coach, working with one group or student and then another. Computer technology further supported this coaching role by providing a readily viewable display of the student's work and the capability for the student and teacher to jointly generate, try out, and evaluate alternative approaches.

Involvement in technology-based educational reform efforts had effects also on the teachers themselves. Although technology-supported classroom projects required a great deal of the teachers' own time, as well as great effort, they paid sizable dividends in terms of the teachers' own professional growth. Respondents talked about:

An increase in their technology and pedagogical skills. In addition to learning about the technologies that are incorporated in their classroom activities, teachers acquired skills in setting up cooperative work groups, providing individualized coaching, and orchestrating multiple parallel activities within their classrooms.
Greater collaboration within their own school. The introduction of new technologies gave teachers a compelling reason to come together to think about what they were really trying to teach and how technology could support their goals, to learn about new technologies, and to plan multidisciplinary technology-supported projects.
Contact and collaboration with external school reform and research organizations. Many technology-supported projects were funded or initiated by outside organizations that worked with the classroom teachers in designing and implementing classroom applications of technology.
Involvement in training and professional conferences. Involvement in technology-related activities brought many teachers recognition, not only within their schools but also at state, national, and international conferences.

Implementation Lessons

As challenging as it is to bring a constructivist approach to an individual classroom, there is an equally difficult challenge in implementing a schoolwide reform. Central to this challenge is getting all or most of the teachers within a school to buy into a coherent instructional vision and strategies for using technology to support that vision. School leadership and time and opportunity for joint decision-making and the forging and continual refinement of a common vision must emerge.

Our case study schools were not uniformly successful in implementing a schoolwide reform that brought the constructivist model and technology use to every classroom. But their disappointments and failures were just as informative as their successes. From their experiences, we derived a number of lessons for technology-supported educational reform efforts:

Time must be devoted to developing a schoolwide vision, a consensus around instructional goals, and a shared philosophy concerning the kinds of technology-supported activities that would support those goals. Site-based management and grant opportunities can serve as catalysts for such discussions.
Adequate technology access is needed for all students. To the extent that there are only a few computers in regular classrooms or computers are clustered in a few labs in one part of the school, most teachers have little opportunity to, and indeed feel little responsibility for, integrating technology into their instruction. We conclude that a classroom needs roughly one computer for every four students if students are to have the kind of access they need to engage in significant technology-supported projects.
Teachers need time to learn to use technology and to incorporate it into their own curricular goals. Particularly after the initial hurdles, learning to use a new piece of hardware or software in a mechanical sense is a fairly short-term activity. Thinking about how technology can support one's own instructional goals, however, and learning how to orchestrate a class in which students are doing challenging projects, portions of which are technology based, take much longer. It is this latter kind of training that is all too often missing from technology implementation efforts. These kinds of learning need to occur over time, preferably with opportunities to observe models, to practice, and to receive feedback on one's actions.
Easily accessible technical support is critical. Most teachers have limited technology experience, and, even if they are comfortable with using a technology they have not completely mastered in front of their students, these teachers will not be willing to plan around technology use if there is a good chance they will encounter technical problems that they cannot get fixed for days or weeks. Many more teachers will incorporate technology into their teaching if on-site technical assistance is readily available.
The system should provide rewards and recognition for exemplary technology-supported activities. Like the rest of us, teachers are influenced by the reward structure around them when it comes to deciding where to place their energies. Not surprisingly, school leadership that values technology and education reform activities is associated with more widespread and sustained emphasis in these areas.
Good curricular content must come first. Although in some cases the availability of new technology may inspire projects, it is critical that strong curriculum content drive the design of technology-supported activities. For some, there will be a temptation to assign projects that use an exciting new technology but have little curricular value. Starting planning with educational needs and instructional goals can provide the discipline to keep technology-supported projects "on track."
The project should provide opportunities for teachers to collaborate with peers. The most ambitious and successful technology-supported projects typically were planned and executed by teacher teams rather than a teacher working alone. All the well-known advantages of team work, such as multiple sources of inspiration, expertise, and energy, apply to the difficult job of bringing off a student-centered classroom. When teachers work together, they seem to plan more far-reaching and ambitious activities than when they work in isolation.
Technology should be used across subject matters and classrooms. There is a certain amount of "overhead" that goes with learning to use any new technology. Students need to acquire keyboarding skills and learn how to get into programs and files and to store their work in appropriate ways. The more classes and grades over which this "technology overhead" can be spread, the better. Moreover, when technology is used across a broad range of classes, many more students find enjoyable uses for new technology applications and feel confident about their ability to learn them.

Costs for implementing technology-supported reforms will vary from school to school, depending on the kinds of technology used, the number of students, and the requirements for major infrastructure investments (e.g., wiring and structural modifications). As an order-of-magnitude approximation, we estimate that if costs for the needed additional teacher training and preparation time are included in the projection, attaining the vision of technology-supported constructivist classrooms will run about $400 to $500 per pupil a year. Teacher training and preparation costs are the missing or underfunded elements in many technology implementation budgets.

Policy Implications

We believe that the difficulty we experienced in finding schools with large numbers of classrooms incorporating technology-supported constructivist teaching and learning approaches is in itself a significant finding. The scarcity of these classrooms testifies to the magnitude of the change we are looking for and the challenges--individual, organizational, and logistical--to making it happen.

It is clear from our case studies that the effects that technology has on students depend on the instructional context provided by individual teachers. This finding implies not only that the impact of technology will vary from classroom to classroom but also that the issues of teacher buy-in, teacher training, and teacher support are essential to success. Approaches in which a higher level of the education system decides what equipment a school will get or how they are to use it, where teachers do not participate in the process of thinking through instructional goals and selecting appropriate technologies and software to match them, are likely to lead to disappointment and wasted resources. At the same time, we do 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 by 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. Higher levels of the education system have a responsibility to provide a framework that invites, supports, and sustains innovation.

These levels of the system have an important role also 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 fact that we identified classrooms and schools that do approximate our vision and that do so with students from all segments of our society is an encouraging message. Technology, project-based learning, and advanced skills are not the exclusive province of older, economically privileged, or fluent English-speaking students. Our case studies show clearly that these approaches are powerful motivators for students from all economic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. The most economically disadvantaged students in our society can use technology tools to support their own learning, to create high-quality products, and to support collaboration with others.

In addition to the challenges to teachers, schools, and the education system described above, making technology a force for learning and positive change in our schools poses challenges to our communities. We think it is no accident that only one of our nine sites was able to launch its technology-intensive reform agenda without a significant level of funding from organizations outside the education system. In eight cases, private corporations and foundations and/or research organizations with external funding were pivotal. In an era of diminishing education budgets and public reluctance to raise taxes, we are unlikely to see the kinds of activities described in this report available to most of our children unless the private sector engages actively, constructively, and over the long term with schools that are eager to make technology part of significant efforts to improve.

Overall, our research suggests that the press for reform is worthwhile, but it must be coupled with the realization that, especially when technology is involved, reform takes an extended period to come to fruition, requires significant resources, and must attend to teachers' needs for support in undertaking both new learning and more difficult roles. Technology is not an easy route to transforming schools, but our case study sites suggest that it is an exciting one.

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[Acknowledgments]

[Introduction]