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!