TECHNOS

July 27, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 2002 Vol. 11 No. 1

It's Time We Started Asking the Right Questions

By Laurence Peters

Can we now ask the right questions from our investment in educational technology? New federal legislation provides the prompt …

Despite the recent findings that the advent of the Internet has not, according to a September 2000 National Center of Education Statistics Report, “dramatically changed how teachers teach or how students learn” — and serious misgivings from a number of educational experts about the value of computer-based educational approaches — President George W. Bush recently signed a bill that would provide roughly a billion dollars in educational technology spending. This is an increase of $60 million above last year's levels and all the more remarkable for being enacted subsequent to the tragic events of September 11, when very little that was not national security related saw the legislative light of day.

Such an outcome was never that clear during the campaign season, when the Bush policy advisors were expressing skepticism about the value of technology spending and were cautioning that investments in technology needed to be research based and tested. Campaign material also placed in doubt continued funding of one of the main drivers of technology use in school, the $2.5 billion subsidy of telecommunications services for schools located in high poverty areas, commonly known as the E-Rate. In contrast to the Clinton-Gore enthusiasm concerning all things technological — and their passion to connect first every school and then every classroom to the Internet — the Bush “wait-and-see” approach had many in the technology industry concerned that the impetus behind the massive increases in federal uses of technology over the last decade, which stimulated a commensurate amount of state spending, might vaporize as quickly as it had come. This would leave the impression that the bets placed on the educational technology industry were as wishful as those placed on dot.com companies and just as fragile.

A Political Turnaround

The turnaround in educational technology fortunes was the result of several factors. When any administration comes to town, those in it learn quickly that in return for gaining support for their priority issues (in the case of the Bush Administration, annual testing) they need to accommodate those of Congressional leaders. Since day one, those leaders have remained enthusiastic supporters of technology, and that support is deep and widespread across party lines. The reasons are not hard to find. Both suburban and inner-city parents alike continue to imagine that computers in classrooms are synonymous with educational progress and their mere presence indicates that their children are being prepared for the new workforce. Business, in turn, supports this fundamental consensus, casting one eye on the demands of industry as it attempts to recruit technology-literate workers and the other on the increasingly profitable potential of the global education-technology market.

The Bush “wait-and-see” approach had many in the technology industry concerned …

But technology boosters are increasingly facing the types of criticisms that led to the Bush campaign advisers' wanting to distance themselves from the gung-ho technophoria of their opponents. With the anticipated decline in state revenues and concomitant pressures to show improvements in student achievement, states are facing harder choices as to whether to continue to invest in the ever more expensive technology upgrades or to focus more on those budget items that show more direct linkages to test improvement. State technology dollars are already seeking to make explicit that connection. In some cases, it is building portal sites based around standards — such as Pennsylvania's current $26.8 million investment in its Link to Learn site — in other cases, such as Georgia's $10 million, three-year middle school pilot project, it provides laptops to every student and teacher and special Internet-delivered content. In this same vein, the new federal legislation calls for the development of state and local technology plans that clearly set out the way that the strategy will lead to demonstrated improvements in student learning.

Stanford's Larry Cuban Asks Questions

To what extent the latest efforts to answer the critics will be successful will depend on a clearer understanding of what realistically a well-trained teacher in an appropriately technology-enhanced classroom environment can achieve. Asking the right questions about the difference technology makes for students has proved to be a more difficult task than it first appeared.

Clearly, some technology critics (as have some of the boosters) have not helped sharpen the debate. For example, even Larry Cuban, perhaps as emeritus Stanford professor and former superintendent the most well known and respected of the leading skeptics, confuses the issue in his latest jeremiad, Oversold and Underused (Harvard University Press, 2001), by arguing that even in the heart of Northern California's Silicon Valley, where we would expect teachers to be using technology well, it is more of a sideshow (used predominately for surfing the Internet and word processing) than central to their teaching. “[I]n the midst of the swift spread of computers and the Internet to all facets of American life,” Cuban writes, “e-learning in public schools has turned out to be word processing and Internet searches. … Teachers at all levels of schooling have used the new technology basically to continue what they have always done: communicate with parents and administrators, prepare syllabi and lectures, record grades, assign research papers.”

In seeking an explanation for this phenomenon, Cuban tests three possible explanations that exclude blaming teachers for the problem. The first, that we are participating in a “slow revolution” whereby the vanguard movement of teachers currently using technology well in their classrooms will slowly expand; the second, that there are some deeply embedded belief systems concerning teaching and learning that prevent teachers from really doing much more than supplementing their traditional teaching practices; and third, that the organizational obstacles placed in front of teachers are problematic, from a lack of sufficient computers available to their unreliability due to poor or non-existent technical support and other practical issues. Cuban avers that it really comes down to the poor fit between two cultures: on the one hand, the culture that seeks to use computers to promote student-based learning; on the other hand, the culture that seeks to ensure that classrooms do not fundamentally change their purposes and functions. He predicts, for example, that the goal of providing every student with his or her own computer will be met, but despite this eventuality “no fundamental change in teaching practices will occur.”

Another possible explanation for the slow progress we have made in really harnessing technology to transform the way schools operate — one that Cuban does not consider — is maybe we have asked the wrong questions when we have applied it to educational settings. Arguably the first impetus behind the massive spending on educational technology was not to raise student achievement, but rather to improve students' workforce skills, skills that most parents and certainly business understood as centrally including information-technology literacy. Now, as is clearly evident from the new federal legislation, the question is: How can the technology assist with student achievement? But in the last decade we have lacked that focus. Our investments have largely been vendor and product driven. Those who purchase on behalf of teachers have been “sold” on the latest feature-rich software and fast network connections, and they felt it was not necessary to provide any explanation to teachers as to how popular software titles or integrated reading programs improved what needed to be taught. Teachers (often the lowest down on the food chain when it comes to the procurement of materials), however, adapted some of the educational features to fit their curriculum goals. What has often been ignored is the central question: What can technology-based instruction and learning do better than traditional methods? And, to what extent does it enable students to spend more time on the actual educational tasks that lead to improvements in skill and knowledge?

Research versus Marketing

The connection between student achievement and time spent on task is perhaps one of the most consistent and reliable findings in the entire field of educational research — and it is odd how frequently it gets overlooked. Superintendents and their technology and procurement directors can be thrilled by all kinds of impressive sounding statistics, sometimes converted to happy sounding advertising copy by software vendors, but they seldom ask some important common-sense questions, such as: What activity in the curriculum is this technology tool going to replace? What educational goal is it going to allow us to reach more effectively? So the question becomes not so much, How can we provide more technology into the classroom (more computers, bandwidth, and software)? but rather, What are the technology-based interventions that can best lead to improvements in learning? In this regard, we have not made enough headway; research in this area is often superficial, lacking adequate samples and lack of control groups. Even the research that Larry Cuban conducted for his study was based on just seven months' survey of two high-tech schools located in Silicon Valley and done without any references to student achievement or analysis of how the time spent by the so-called heavy users of technology differed from the less dependent users and what difference that made to the student outcomes.

Studying How Technology Makes a Difference

The tendency among Cuban and his peers is to see technology in blanket terms — as if the use of computers in classrooms did not differ in significant ways from the uses of educational television or slide projectors. While this is not an uncommon view, the danger is that researchers can be all too easily captured by it, so that just because the predominant use of computers in classrooms today is for word processing, games, and Internet surfing, we can pass over the less common uses and fail to study their impact that may not be evident using the gross measures of standardized test scores. The studies that should really count here are studies that compare how the use of certain software or access to a technology device makes a difference and for what types of student, and how that compares to traditional approaches. The next level of analysis would identify under what conditions success is obtainable for what types of student — in other words, how many computers are needed in the standard-size classrooms? With what level of teacher proficiency and type of curriculum and lesson plans are the desired results obtainable? The studies that come closest to this are unfortunately the studies undertaken by vendors and seldom shared with the rest of us, except when they can help make a sale.

Business got to be successful using technology because technology applications were clearly designed to improve upon existing business functions.

Business got to be successful using technology because technology applications were clearly designed to improve upon existing business functions. Whether it be the spreadsheet or the fax machine, these technologies enabled huge leaps in productivity because as they automated such prosaic functions as purchasing and accounting, they transformed those functions — so that the very nature of what it means to be in business changed. New concepts of marketing were possible because technology enabled such developments as “just-in-time” delivery, saving huge warehousing and transportation costs. That type of revolution is also possible in education but it may take some time for educators to realize the essential questions that they need to be asking themselves.

Harvard's Chris Dede Asks Questions

Harvard professor Chris Dede is a frequent witness before Congress who combines in-depth knowledge of learning theory with a passion for the policy issues that have dogged successful integration of technology into the classroom. Dede uses the following analogy: What would happen if you dropped a vial of antibiotics into a stone-age culture? If people smeared it on the skin, made it part of a sacrifice, or someone swallowed it all, it would not achieve its purpose. The condition for success would be a precise dose for a very specific set of symptoms. Dede's point is that a medical as opposed to an educational intervention is so much more complex.

In a school context, it is often very difficult to control many of the critical variables. Even those fortunate teachers in Silicon Valley can count on only some of them — they may have sufficient computers and bandwidth and other resources, but what they lack is a compelling vision for its use and precise enough questions concerning what learning objectives the technology is going to enable that traditional methods could not accomplish. In what way will it generate more in-depth understanding of subject-matter content; reach less motivated, special needs, or non-communicative students; gain deeper subject-matter insights; what is the evidence to suggest it will; and under what conditions? Among such conditions are some rudimentary ones, such as a sufficient number of computers — most classrooms have fewer than six computers in them, so it is impractical for all students to use the software — sometimes the cost of licenses for the product are too prohibitive to be used on more than one or two machines; so, how many machines and access hours does it take for success?

In a school context, it is often very difficult to control many of the critical variables.

The question of fit between the problem and the solution turns out to be even more complicated in education than it is in medicine. Consider the issue of assistive technologies. How does an average teacher begin to assess what types of text-to-voice software, for instance, might be appropriate for what types of students who are struggling with reading? This is a situation in which the research base is extremely murky, even contradictory at times, and the software is very expensive. In an age of mainstreamed classrooms, how does our poor teacher sort through those issues and then decide, when she works her way through that maze, which children get more use of the computer resources and on what basis? If individual businesses (not to say managers) had to make these types of critical choices when they were beginning to purchase technology, we may not have seen much progress.

New Federal Legislation Asks Questions, Too

The new education bill, “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001: Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, has the potential to create at least an opportunity for these types of questions to be raised. In order for states and local districts to gain their share of funds, they must write a technology plan that at least in theory shows how their investments in technology will lead to greater student achievement. The notion of accounting for federal dollars in terms of student progress is nothing new. What is new for Washington is to ask state and local school district administrators to justify technology costs in these terms.

States and school districts would do well to begin by sitting down with groups of teachers and deciding if there are some better ways to organize their technology purchases and utilization. Below are three suggestions to begin such a discussion:

Develop a standard Q&A sheet for both principals and school districts prior to any major technology procurement and development of any strategic plan. Such a questionnaire could include a question that asks a school district to identify the match between its perceived needs for technology and its educational goals. For example, if the school and the school district's desire is to ensure that all students are reading by 4th grade, what is currently being done successfully to reach that goal? What is the role played by technology in some or all the relevant classrooms? Should the choice be to purchase a new product, or should it be to service or augment what exists but is not being implemented because key conditions for its success are not being met? Or can a new product or service effectively overcome the current barriers (lack of computers, lack of teacher preparation time, etc.)? What is the evidence to suggest this?

Is there an education equivalent of Consumer Reports that could serve us well here?

Develop an ongoing database that will enable school districts to keep track of new products and services that have not yet been fully tested. Is there an education equivalent of the Consumer Reports that could serve us well here, one that would indicate in a reliable and objective way what technology is working and why?
Develop a standard Q&A sheet for the vendor community that enables school districts to see quickly what is the range of “technology solutions,” and how effective they have been in practice with what types of students.

But the story must not end there, if we are to really reap the benefits of technology in education. As business started doing a decade earlier, the benefits will come because we have built a knowledge base that is larger than the single classroom and even the single district and specifies the conditions for success. And, it's time we started asking the right questions.

Laurence Peters is director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Technology in Education Consortium at Temple University in Philadelphia < www.temple.edu/martec >. He is a past contributor to TECHNOS Quarterly, see TQ 9:2 and 10:1, both online in the TECHNOS archive.