Computers in the Classroom: Uses, Abuses, and Political Realities
The Failure of Technological
Panaceas in Education
In the 1950s, many people thought that educational television was going
to be the answer to the woes of our schools. Visionaries proclaimed that
in the future, when people were traveling to work via jet pack and having
their homes cleaned by robots, every classroom would have a television
set. Lessons, given by the best teachers in the country, would be beamed
by satellite to the nationís students. The magic of televisionópictures
and sounds traveling through the airówould make ordinary classroom teachers
obsolete.
Of course, nothing of the kind happened. No one developed a nationwide
system of televised courses for elementary and secondary school students.
Televisions did enter classrooms, but they were used for little more than
showing an occasional documentary film or a movie version of a Shakespearean
play. Meanwhile, students weaned on television at home developed habits
of passive noninteraction that actually had a negative impact on education.
So much for the first great technological revolution in schools.
The NEXT BIG THING in educational technology was supposed to be the
language lab. Schools invested heavily in such labs during the 1970s, installing
rows of cubicles with headphones for skill and drill instruction in Spanish,
French, and German. Again the technology proved to be a failure. Students
learned languages more effectively when they interacted with real people
in immersion environments than when they listened to bits of canned speech
and made rote responses. In retrospect, the outcome seems obvious, but
technology has a way of turning peopleís heads. Eventually, most of the
expensive high school language labs were dismantled.
Recently, politicians and some educators have begun touting computers
as the next technological panacea, the one that will turn classrooms into
cybernetic gardens for growing young minds. The difference, this time,
is that the technologists might be right. As we shall see, computers do
have the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning, but only if
in implementing their use in classrooms we take seriously the lessons learned
from the failure of educational television and of the language lab. Before
considering these lessons, however, and their implications for using computers
in education, it will be useful to consider the general political climate
driving educational reform today.
The Politics of Education ìReformî
As certain as death and taxes, when election time rolls around, politicians
will begin giving speeches about education reform. These days, of course,
politicians never stop running for office, and so they never stop talking
about reforming schools. The typical education reform soapbox speech runs
something like this: ìOur schools are failing. They arenít doing their
job. Test scores are falling. We need to get tough with teachers and teacherís
unions. The American people demand some accountability. Throwing money
at the problem isnít going to solve it. We need fundamental change. We
need reform. We have to stop fooling around and get back to basics.î Such
speeches play well with the electorate, but they paint an excessively dire
picture of the state of American education, fail to characterize in a useful
way the challenges facing educators, and lead to ìsolutionsî that simply
compound the problems that do exist with elementary and secondary schools
today.
It is true that average scores on such standardized tests as the SAT
fell during the 1980s. It is also true, however, that the falling SAT scores
largely reflected the increased socioeconomic diversity of the student
population taking the tests and thus were a positive rather than a negative
indicator. Furthermore, in recent years standardized test scores have actually
been improving. The average score, nationwide, on the verbal component
of the SAT increased from a low of 424 in 1980-81 to a moderately better
428 in 1994-95, while the average score on the mathematics component improved
from 466 in 1979-80 to a three-decade high of 482 in 1994-95. So,
what politicians typically say about falling test scores is false. But
even if it werenít, even if those scores were falling slightly, this would
not be reason to indict the educational system, because standardized tests
are a poor measure of the success or failure of education in general. Such
tests measure studentsí ability to perform isolated, mechanical operations
but tell us nothing about their ability to apply these operations in real
contexts. For example, research has long shown that there is little correlation
between a studentís ability to identify and correct errors in capitalization,
punctuation, usage, or grammar on so-called ìobjective testsî and the frequency
of such errors in their speech and writing. The problem is that skills
taught in isolation from real contexts, those in which students have some
goal-oriented investment, are not then transferred to such real contexts.
Furthermore, standardized tests do not measure higher-order skills such
as the ability to work successfully in collaboration with others or to
behave in a goal-oriented manner when undertaking a project or solving
a problem. Consider, for example, the objective of teaching students to
communicate effectively in writing. Standardized tests do nothing to measure
a studentís ability to identify an audience and purpose, formulate a topic,
gather relevant information, organize that information, draft, edit, revise,
proofread, and prepare the final copy for publication or sharing with others.
What the standardized tests do not show is the unmeasured successes
that are occurring throughout the United States as a result of the widespread
adoption of writing process and integrated mathematics instruction. Writing
process instruction breaks writing down into partsóprewriting, drafting,
revising, proofreading, and publishingóand teaches students useful rules
of thumb for carrying out each part of the process. Integrated mathematics
instruction is a collaborative approach to mathematics instruction that
makes use of teams who apply higher-order thinking strategies to real-life
mathematical problems that require application of skills in the formerly
separate disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and trigonometry.
Teachers using these approaches know their effectiveness, but the general
public hears little about them, especially not from politicians.
The ìletís get toughî talk of politicians points education away from
the quiet, positive reforms being made, reforms that are producing real
results, and back toward rote memorization; instruction in isolated, nontransferable
skills; and standardized testing. Under political pressure, nearly every
state in the union has instituted new standardized tests, which encourage
teachers and administrators to give up new curricular approaches in favor
of teaching isolated facts and skills to prepare students for these tests.
The problem with the old teaching methodsórote memorization and instruction
in isolated skillsóis that they do not adequately prepare students for
the lives that they will actually lead.
Almost all the jobs in the United States in the
twenty-first century will be in the service or information sectors. These
jobs will require the students to have ability to
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communicate effectively in speech and in writing
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work collaboratively
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use technological tools such as computers
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analyze problems, set goals, and formulate strategies for achieving those
goals
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seek out information or skills on their own, as needed, to meet their goals
The real problem facing our schools is how to reinvent themselves to ensure
that students will develop these abilities. Important steps are already
being taken to do just that. In addition to implementing new curricular
approaches, such as process writing and integrated mathematics instruction,
many schools across the country are adopting new scheduling and assessment
techniques that encourage project-based collaborative learning. Modular
scheduling, widely adopted throughout the United States, makes possible
fewer, longer classes in which students and teachers actually have the
time to carry out projects that provide real contexts for learning skills.
Students work collaboratively to complete these projects, formulate goals
and strategies, take responsibility for learning what they need to learn
to carry out their strategies, and then are assessed based on their project
performance. Project-based, integrated curricula, combined with modular
scheduling and performance assessment, are beginning to change schools
in positive ways. Using these approaches, educators will be able to produce
citizens capable of the collaborative effort, higher-order thinking, and
independent, self-directed learning required of citizens in a service-
and information-based economy. But even as this quiet revolution occurs
in classes throughout the country, it is being undermined by the politiciansí
insistence on standardized testing, rote memorization in the name of cultural
literacy, and back-to-basics skill and drill instruction. If education
reform means more standardized testing, more rote memorization, and more
isolated skills instruction, then the reforms will be the beginning of
a long, hard slide.
Lessons from the Language Lab
The Clinton/Gore administration has set as one of its major educational
goals providing computers and Internet hookups to every school in the country.
We are on our way toward implementing the next massive introduction of
technology into classrooms. But if this latest innovation is to work, we
must learn the lessons taught by the failure of educational television
and language labs.
Assuming that the political will can be found
to fund the computerization of our classrooms (and that is a big assumption,
given the cost), there still remains the larger issue of how, precisely,
those computers might be used. In a political climate in which people are
calling for more standardized testing and more skill and drill, computers
might well be used for purposes that will undermine the kind of learning
that is necessary for success in an information-age economy. Educational
television and language labs failed because they promoted passivity and
were used for rote memorization or skill and drill. Computers have the
potential for similar misuse. On the one hand, they can become mere entertainment
machines, like television, providing lots of appealing graphics and sounds
but little genuinely instructive interaction. On the other hand, they can
be used simply to drill students, over and over, in repetitive, isolated
skills. Computers used in these ways would prove no more valuable than
previous unsuccessful technologies were.
Unfortunately, most educational software available today fails in one
of these two ways. The software amounts to little more than ìedutainment,î
to use Bill Gatesís apt coinage, or ìworksheets on a screen.î The potential
exists, however, for computers and the Internet to be much, much more.
What Computers Might Do for Classrooms
One excellent reason for introducing computers into schools is that, according
to the authors of the Education for the Twenty-First Century Act, 60 percent
of jobs in the next century will require computer skills. So, on the most
obvious level, computers can make classrooms more relevant. Of equal importance
is the fact that if used correctly, computers can facilitate training of
students in the modes of action and interaction that twenty-first century
lives will require.
Computers as Tools for Self-Directed Learning
At one time it was possible to train young people to perform tasks that
they could then apply throughout a lifetime. The apprentice blacksmith
would learn and use the same techniques used by his father, his grandfather
before him, and so on back through the ages. Today, however, the pace of
technological change is so great that a set of skills learned yesterday
can be obsolete in a year or so. Therefore, to be successful, people have
to be able to teach themselves, to retool, to find for themselves the resources
that they need for learning new skills to keep pace with their changing
environments. All too often, however, our schools encourage students to
think of learning not as something that they do but as something that is
done to them. Schools also teach, incidentally, covertly, that learning
is something that one does at some particular time in oneís lifeóduring
the time that one is in schoolórather than something that is done continually,
throughout oneís life. Computers can help to change that mindset, that
paradigm of externally motivated, one-time learning. Computers allow students
to take charge of their own learning and to proceed at their own pace.
Starting with a general interest in space or rainforests or Egyptian mummies,
a student can get online, track down hundreds of sources of information,
follow that information where it leads, and formulate his or her own curriculum
under the direction of a general project goal and the guidance of a teacher/facilitator.
Such experiences teach students more than specific information about space
or rainforests or mummies. They teach students how to learn, how to direct
their own learning, and how to find and discriminate among sources of information.
They also teach students that learning can be an exciting pursuit of oneís
own interests.
Computers as Tools for Collaborative
Project Work
Information and service workers, those who will make up the vast majority
of the twenty-first century workforce, typically operate in project teams.
They need to be able to communicate effectively with one another, to establish
project goals, to plan strategies for attaining those goals, to break up
the work among team members, to report their progress to one another, to
evaluate this progress, and to synthesize their individual efforts into
a final product. Networked computers are excellent tools for such collaborative
project work. Students can use scheduling software to plan their projects,
communicate over networks about their projects, store project components
in a central place, use individual software tools (such as word processors,
Internet browsers, and graphics programs) to carry out specific project
tasks, evaluate their progress using online evaluation forms, and design
elegant final products for sharing with their teachers and classmates.
Computers as Research Tools
An information-age job, by definition, requires that one be able to gain
access to information, and computers are unparalleled tools for doing just
that. In the past, a student with a research project was limited to the
few resources available in his or her school or community libraryóall too
often a few aging encyclopedias and a handful of tattered books on a handful
of school-related topics. Today, the resources of the world are a keystroke
away. Homework help, vast libraries, reference works, museums, government
and educational archives, news reportsóthese are but a few of the many
resources available on the Internet. Instantly, and with little effort,
the student has access not just to local resources but to the resources
of the globe.
Computers as Exploratoria
One of the problems often confronted by educators is the difficulty of
getting students to envision what is being described by all those words
in textbooks. What is the structure of a DNA molecule? What did the universe
look like seconds after the Big Bang? Just where was Crete, and how was
Minoan civilization destroyed? How does the heart work? How did Heinrich
Schliemann figure out from reading the Odyssey where the ruins of
Troy were buried? What is the water cycle? What does the interior of the
earth look like? Computers can show students these things, not passively,
in the mode of television, but interactively. A student can call up a map
of ancient Greece and follow the path of Odysseus through the Mediterranean
from Troy to Ithaca or can pretend to be a water molecule, enter a root
hair, travel up the stem of a plant, and evaporate into the air. Computers
can take students where they otherwise could not go and make learning into
a thrilling, self-directed journey.
Making It All Happen
For this vision of the future of computing in education to become a reality,
a lot will have to happen. First, governments, federal and state, will
have to come up with enormous amounts of money. Most schools today have
only a few computers and very little software. The computers that are now
in schools tend to be ancient models with little capability, most are not
networked, and as often as not, no one in the school knows how to operate
them. There are a little more than 82,000 elementary and secondary schools
in the United States. Supplying each school with 50 personal computer systems
at $1,200 apiece (a woefully inadequate number) would cost $4.92 billion
dollars. Purchasing a few standard software packages, Ethernet cards, and
cabling for those machines would cost, conservatively, another $4.1 billion.
Providing high-bandwidth Internet connections for all those computers might
cost another $2.3 billion. Providing minimal training to teachers and administrators
so that they would at least know how to turn on those computers and operate
a few standard software programs would cost at least half a billion more.
That comes to a total of about $11.82 billion, and this price does not
include routine maintenance, upgrades, peripheral devices such as printers
and scanners, funds for purchasing special-purpose educational software,
or money to replace obsolescent software and hardware every three years
or so. In addition, new computers will bring about little change without
new curricula and teachers trained in these curriculaóteachers who know,
themselves, how to harness the research and project potential of these
machines. President George Bush was fond of saying that ìyou canít solve
the education problem by throwing money at it,î which was a lot like saying
that you canít solve a personal transportation problem by buying a car.
Obviously, buying the car (or coming up with money for bus fare) is a necessary
but insufficient solution. If you buy the car, then you have to know how
to drive it. If we want to prepare students for life in the twenty-first
century, if we want to maintain our economic edge, then we had better find
the money to buy them computers and to hook them up to the Internet. But
we need also to pay for the training and the curricular development necessary
to fulfill the promise of this technology. Will we bite the bullet and
make such an investment in our children? We canít afford not to.
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