ICTs not clearly linked to learning outcomes? Teaching as Inquiry to the rescue!

Believe it or not, the use of ICTs in the classroom hasn’t yet been clearly linked to improved student outcomes! Check this quite nice overview of the relationship between ICTs and learning as it stands now. As we see governments sink a bunch of money into using ICTs in education all over the world (our own being as keen as all the rest) many of the links between the use of an ICTs and actual learning outcomes is often based solely on teacher observation. The 2009 report on the ICT PD school cluster programme only, “provides some proxy evidence of the conscious alignment of ICT-based classroom activities to identified student learning outcomes.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with empirical evidence per se. As teachers we have some pretty compelling observations of ICT benefits like: increased engagement, students better able to manage and make decisions about their own learning, increased collaboration and skills in managing this and access to more information with a subsequent responsibility for us to develop students’ skills in managing and critically thinking through the information morass that is the internet. While we continue to try and maximise the benefits of ICTs for students, we’re also getting better at helping them to avoid the learning negatives. We continue to consider what ‘non-learning’ stuff looks like on their devices: playing silly games, watching season 5 of Breaking Bad (a student in my tutorial last week was trying to re-watch all of series 1-4 while working on his formal writing - he wasn’t doing too bad actually!) and facebook for reminiscing about the weekend.

So while we’re informally observing some benefits of ICTs for our students, we’re also waiting for the academic research to identify direct links between ICTs and learning. Are there more rigorous ways we can find these links ourselves though? If we want to actively monitor how an ICT is helping improve student learning, Teaching as Inquiry offers us both a helping hand and a responsibility here. The focussing inquiry has emphasised the need for us to deeply question our theories on students’ present contexts before considering exactly how we might help improve outcomes with an appropriate choice of a practice change in the teaching inquiry phase of the process. The guts for how we might more carefully evaluate the learning outcome of an ICT comes in the learning inquiry. Not only does Teaching as Inquiry help us think about the learning before we get carried away with the ICT itself, it also shows us that if we consider how we’re going to measure the outcomes of an ICT before introducing it, we can get a more accurate understanding of what learning outcomes it has improved. We might just use observations as a way of doing this or we might seek data by asking students directly or even with formative assessments designed specifically to check this.

There are a bunch of good resources the MOE has provided to help us here too. Check out the generic e-learning as inquiry resources and e-learing as inquiry on literacy online. Although it seems that connecting ICT use directly to improved student learning outcomes might be difficult, I suspect academic research on these connections will eventually appear in one form or another. It will be interesting to see what this adds to our understanding of the relationship between technology, knowledge and learning. In the meantime though, lets get sharing our Teaching as Inquiry findings on how they’re working in our own classes!

What learning is the ‘right’ learning?

Since seeing a number of teachers in recent years using facebook for class groups I’ve had some difficulty coming to grips with the fact just because a student is on facebook, they might not necessarily be slacking off. It was sooooo easy a couple of years ago! Facebook??? “Naughty! Get back to work.” Now it’s all different. Facebook??? “Hmmm, that’s interesting. What group are you in there? Ohhh, it’s your health class group. Righto then.” It’s rather a lot more confusing and time consuming now. In the old days I could just order them to get back to work but now I have to inquire into what they’re actually doing. Sometimes I even end up in a lengthy conversation about what they’re learning in a vague attempt to cover or apologise for any initial assumptions I made that they weren’t learning anything useful.

But the thing that really bothers me, the stuff that’s starting to erode those old boundaries around what’s OK and what’s not, is that it’s not just whether they are on facebook that’s confusing, it’s a whole bunch of other thing as well. What makes learning the ‘right’ learning now? If they are working on a little bit of science in economics class, is it wrong when they’re choosing to prioritise an upcoming assessment they have next period? It certainly makes my job much easier as a teacher if they’re only allowed to work on my subject when they’re with me. Strangely though, during tutorial time we encourage them to prioritise the important work they need to do, anything that they need expert assistance on or really want to improve and now I’m telling them they just need to work on my subject for exactly one hundred minutes a day. Hmmmm. It doesn’t stop there though, what about learning beyond traditional subject boundaries? What if they’re reading up on something not specifically related to a school subject like project management or yacht design? And how do we justify our content anyway? Are the narratives in The Great Gatsby and For Whom the Bell Tolls more compelling than the events depicted in LA Noir, Fallout (who doesn’t love Ron Pearlman???) Red Dead Redemption (horrible spoiler in that link) or The Last of Us? Is the social commentary in computer games like these as powerful as Jane Austin’s? There might actually be some arguments both ways. And what about the student who is awesomely passionate about learning in one crazy area, I dunno, something like 3d animation and game design (I’d like to think of some non-nerdy examples here but that’s what I remember best) and they’re totally hating on that fifth subject they have to take. Are they ever going to be into that subject(s) they can’t stand? Even if they do believe that writing essays on literature or conducting science experiments will somehow help them in later life they still commonly fail at that-which-they-can't-stand. I guess they jolly well need to be interested if they want their level 2 NCEA! Gone are they old days where we could just answer the following question: “why are we learning this?” with something along the lines of, “because you’re in my class. And here’s a detention for being smart.” Whether or not students are more or less polite than they used to be isn’t the issue and it’s not even how well we can answer those questions respectfully that matters as much as how the concept of knowledge is changing and whether we are able to recognise this.

And who is the most concerned about the weight of evidence either way between the values of old and new anyway? I’d suggest that winning these arguments with students (or even framing them up as arguments to begin with) isn’t actually as important for us as educators as developing skills outside the areas that used to suffice. There’s a fascinating article here which summarises some of David Weinberger’s work around How Technology Has Changed Our Idea of ‘Knowledge,’ and What This Means for Schools. As much as a I hate some blogger’s inadequate summary of another text (go read the original! It’s awesome) the article examines Weinberg’s view of the differences between knowledge-transfer via printed media and how this differs from digital media, particularly in terms of the speed at which knowledge is growing and how this is accessed. Books as the primary medium to transfer information led to a view of, “knowledge as a canon of generally accepted wisdom.” Given the way that publishing works, some information got through and other information didn’t. Hence our belief that knowledge in books is more or less authoritative. He goes on to cite reddit as a good example of how a system of knowledge transmitted via digital means can grow much faster and that, “It solves the manageability of information not by omitting knowledge, but by prioritizing it.” When it comes to the what-this-means-to-education bit, Weinberger makes the important point that our response to this shouldn’t be to restrict students to a few particular sources but help them to develop their own filter for what might not be reliable and/or relevant. Digital literacy and knowledge literacy along with the skills to grow useful knowledge collaboratively are far more important than aligning students with our view of what’s useful or relevant by restricting their access to less ‘useful’ or ‘authoritative/correct’ kinds of knowledge.

So as educators we face a real challenge here. We have to continue to adapt our own thinking around knowledge and what is ‘important’ learning and start to look beyond our traditional subject boundaries to define our role and skill-sets. When we’re trying to plan programmes to meet student needs or a student asks why they’re learning what they’re learning, I think of things like reputable universities offering free phds and a charter school that might offer a customised solution where a student does get to engage in one passion without having to choose the compulsory number of 5 subjects. I wonder if flexibility and helping students learn how to learn and make informed decisions on what to learn may be our best remaining selling point. Because not only do we need to keep developing our own understanding of what ‘useful’ knowledge looks like, we also need to guide students through this process, help them learn the skills to do it themselves so they can make up their own minds about what knowledge and learning may be useful in the future.