A Call for Technological Fluency in Education

Many people today are computer literate. They use computers to communicate with others, prepare documents for work or class and look up information on the Internet. However, few people use computers to their full capacity, and so most people can not be considered truly fluent in technology. In 1991, the National Research Council (NRC) outlined specific ways that educators can help develop fluency with information technology or “FITness” (NRC, 1999). The NRC feels that becoming skillful in computer applications (word processing, etc.) does not prepare students to keep up with the fast pace of technological change. Instead, the NRC advocates teaching children eight “essential elements of FITness” including “managing complexity, testing solutions, managing problems in faulty solutions, organizing/evaluating information, collaborating with others and communicating results” using primarily project-based learning (NRC, 1999). The NRC believes that students need to learn how to use the full power of computers to synthesize and organize new information in order to be successful in the technological world of the future.

Mitchell Resnick goes beyond this goal of enhancing “FITness,” and calls for a full transformation of the current educational system. He feels that education should focus “less on ‘things to know’ and more on ‘strategies for learning the things you don’t know’” (Resnick, 2001, p. 60). He feels that helping students become better learners is crucial to helping them keep up with the potentials of new technologies yet to be developed. He feels that “the computer is the most extraordinary construction material ever invented” and that current computers are “greatly expanding what people can create and what they can learn in the process” (p. 48). He outlines several of MIT's programs that have successfully enhanced technological fluency and warns against using computers “simply to reinforce outmoded approaches to learning” (p. 45). Instead, he calls for a more “entrepreneurial approach to learning” with the teacher serving as a consultant, not as a chief executive” (p. 59).

As an obvious constructionist (“people don’t get ideas, they make them” (Resnick, 2001, p. 47)), Dr Resnick feels that the natural curiosity and creativity of childhood need to be nurtured and developed so that children are more likely to become lifelong learners open to new knowledge and new ways of processing it. He worries that the focus of educators and policy makers has been on closing the “accessibility gap” by getting more computers into the schools for all the students to use. Meanwhile very little is being done to prevent development of a “fluency gap” (p. 49). He fears that if we do not change our teaching to enhance technological fluency, students will fail to “construct things of significance with digital technology” (p. 49). In other words, our educational systems and methods will have shortchanged the potential of this media.

[References]

National Research Council (NRC), 1999. Being Fluent with Information Technology. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. As retrieved on 11/16/06 from http://www.nap.edu/books/030906399X/html/15.html

Resnick, M. (2001). Revolutionizing learning in the digital age. Publications from the forum for the future of higher education. Boulder, CO: Educause.
Available online at http://www.educause.com/reources

Reflections on Educational Reform & Assessment

Our country has long been considered a global leader in many fields. However, as evidence mounts that American schools are failing to prepare children for the “real world”, policy makers, most notably our President, have rushed forward to find ways to force schools to do better (Achieve, 2002). The “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001” was created so that all students would have equal access to a “high quality education” that would help them “reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic assessments” (US DOE, 2006). This legislation mandated the implementation of uniform state assessments that could be used to make comparisons between schools and districts. These assessments have, for the most part, been traditional, written objective tests, familiar to every key stakeholder. Schools who can’t meet state standards on these assessments risk losing tax dollars and/or being directly controlled by that state’s department of education. Eager to avoid these penalties, there has been an unfortunate tendency to encourage teachers to “teach to the test,” a practice which has been shown to have deleterious effects on meaningful student learning, especially among younger children (NCREL, 2006). Ironically, it has also been found that “low-achieving students suffer the most from this approach, because if their initial test scores are low, they often are given dull and repetitive skills instruction that does not enable them to grasp underlying concepts” which can actually lower their achievement test scores (NCREL, 2006). Obviously, this is antithetical to the stated objectives of NCLB.

The main purpose of assessment is to discover and document what is being retained by learners during the educational process. Today there is a vast amount of information available to anyone with access to the Internet, yet learners still need to store a certain amount of this information in their long-term memory in order to be quick and efficient in their respective fields. However, today it is often more important to employers that the learner knows how to access, analyze and use information in the workplace. This means that the standard written examination with its multiple-choice, matching and true-false sections needs to be supplemented with more practical, relevant and authentic measures of how well the knowledge “translates” into practice in real-life situations. Since “what gets assessed is what gets taught” (NCREL, 2006), we need to encourage teachers to measure their students’ competencies in the skill areas most needed in today’s workplace through performance-based assessments or other assessment tools like student portfolios. We need to find ways to ensure that teaching methods foster learning that matches the true needs of our society. It is definitely time to rethink the effects of the current “testing climate” on student learning and ask ourselves if we truly are better off than we were before the NCLB act was put into effect.

[References]

Achieve, Inc., Achieve’s Benchmarking Initiative, June 2002 as retrieved on 11/13/06 from http://www.achieve.org/node/329

US Department of Education, as retrieved on 11/9/06 from
http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg1.html

North Central Regional Education Laboratory (NCREL), as retrieved on 11/7/06 from http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/assment/as700.html

Reflections on Mastery Learning

Students can vary greatly in their aptitudes for learning, but Bloom believes that the vast majority of students can master anything if given enough time to do so. He advocates developing ways of teaching that take into account the differing aptitudes and abilities of each student. He challenges teachers to motivate and help each student achieve mastery in their subjects, something which he feels is possible for up to 95% of all students. In the decades since this paper was written, research in this field has, for the most part, shown Bloom to be correct (Snowman & Biehler, 2006).

Among numerous examples of successful mastery learning programs, I was most intrigued by an application of this instructional approach to teaching what many people consider a very tough subject: chemistry. Chemistry has played an important role at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was, at one time, a required course of study for all students there, regardless of their major (www.umass.edu, retrieved November 4, 2006). Faced with the challenge of teaching a subject that many students find unusually challenging to a huge and diverse group of incoming students, some members of the UMass faculty decided to develop computer modules on basic chemical principles that could be mastered outside of class on the student’s own time and at his/her own pace. They turned to the experts, their own students, to help determine what specific topical areas were the most difficult to master. They asked students majoring in chemistry to develop the first modules, originally as a way to interest them in possibly teaching chemistry under a STEMTEC grant from the National Science Foundation or NSF (Stamm, Fermann, Whelan, Bourdy, Botch, & Vining, 1999).

The resulting mastery learning program, now called OWL for “On-line, Web-based Learning” has proven to be very successful in preparing students for subsequent chemistry and/or other science courses. In fact, the program has been so successful, that the university has recently licensed the OWL program to a major science textbook publisher for inclusion with basic chemistry texts. It claims to be the only chemistry teaching system that was specifically designed to support mastery learning “where students work as long as they need using instantaneous feedback to master each chemical concept and skill” (www.thomson.com, retrieved 11/5/06).

Thus the computer serves as a tutor, which Bloom considered one of the most useful mastery learning strategies, without the expense in human resources required of a one-on-one tutoring relationship. Once again the media (a computer) is used to facilitate an educational method (here mastery learning) and we are left to tease out which of these factors is most important in creating student success.

[References]

Bloom, B.S. (1968). Learning for Mastery, Evaluation Comment, 1 (2), 1-12.

Snowman, J. & Biehler, R. (2006). Psychology Applied to Teaching. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Stamm, K.M., Fermann, J.T., Whelan, T., Broudy R,R,, Botch, B., and Vining, W.J. (1999), The Chemical Educactor 4, 1, 19-22.

www.umass.edu, retrieved November 4, 2006.

www.thomson.com/content/learning/brand_overviews/pf_mastery_learning-owl?vie, retrieved November 5, 2006.