The Internet as a teaching tool is a work in progress--one that is being produced not by individuals but by communities of learners, many of whom have come together through the new communications channels opened by technology. Its educational value ultimately will depend on what we put into it and what we do with the information we take out of it.
"In the Information Age," says education consultant Margaret Riel, "factual knowledge is plentiful. What is scarce is the intellectual work of giving value to information, of transforming information into useful knowledge systems. This is the work of communities."
For many, that work begins with creating educational content worthy of the powerful new transmission pipelines technology creates.
Writer Theodore Roszak once searched the World Wide Web for information about Beethoven. Using one of the popular search engines, he quickly found thousands of websites carrying the famous composer's name. The first was for "Beethoven's Bathroom," a joke shop in New Jersey. Then there were scores of sites related to a popular movie about a dog. When Roszak finally found a site about Ludwig van Beethoven, it was created by an enthusiast with no evident academic credentials. Altogether, Roszak found thousands of supposedly relevant websites, but "almost all of them were useless," he says.
" Of course, there's valuable material there," says Roszak, who once watched kids in a classroom search for information about Aztec culture only to turn up websites on everything from soccer teams and software firms to bowling alleys. "But there's also an awful lot of junk, advertising, and trivia. And there's no quality control."
Roszak's complaint is a common one. Even advocates of using the Internet in the classroom agree that the enormous network, which President Clinton called in his second inaugural address "a commonplace encyclopedia for millions of schoolchildren," is actually an unwieldy, uneven, and often unreliable information source.
"With some exceptions . . . the Internet offers information that is popular, trendy, fashionable, and cool," says Jamieson McKenzie, director of technology and library/media services for the Bellingham public schools in Washington state. "Search for something as central to our national experience as Thanksgiving and you are unlikely to find much more than recipes and tourist attractions."
In his online magazine, From Now On, McKenzie analyzed what famous names produce the most "hits" on the HotBot search engine. While God came in first, Bill Gates outscored Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Buddha, and Socrates. Elvis Presley beat Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Nelson Mandela. "The amount of attention devoted to a particular individual," McKenzie concluded, "seems more a function of their celebrity than their importance to society, their contributions to knowledge, or their good works. The coverage of an idea, a topic, or an issue seems to be shaped more by fashion and fad than significance."
For critics like Roszak, the morass of irrelevant or untrustworthy information shows why the Internet isn't ready for the classroom. And with the rapid growth--and growing commercialization--of the vast network, the deficiencies are getting worse rather than better, they argue. "In the four years since the [Clinton] administration began thinking big about the Internet, cyberspace has become a considerably more cynical, crass, and commercial place," wrote The New Republic's Brian Hecht.
Still, in the past few years there have been substantial efforts aimed at making the Internet a more teacher- and student-friendly place. Resource lists and lesson plans have sprung from a variety of sources. Some of the best are publicly funded; for instance, the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a regional education facility financed by the U.S. Department of Education, offers "Library in the Sky." Universities and colleges have made substantial contributions as well; consider The Faces of Science, an extensive set of profiles of notable African American scientists and engineers compiled by Louisiana State University Libraries.
"In the Information Age factual knowledge is plentiful. What is scarce is the intellectual work of giving value to information, of transforming information into useful knowledge systems. This is the work of communities."
--Margaret Riel, education consultant
Some K-12 school libraries also have become useful Internet sources; Chico High School Library in Chico, California, to cite just one, has compiled extensive lists of sources. Nonprofit groups are getting into the act, too. The Committee for the National Institute for the Environment, for example, has begun building a national library of scientifically sound information about the environment; it includes reports by the Congressional Research Service that have long been available to members of Congress but not to the general public.
Some businesses are starting to offer services that help separate the online wheat from the chaff. Scholastic, Inc., one of the nation's biggest educational content providers and publishers, has developed the Scholastic Network, a web-based resource center for educators. The company also has invested $75 million to develop K-6 social studies and language arts courses. Every unit has an accompanying CD-ROM and uses web sources. McKenzie singles out for praise the Electric Library, which is produced by Infonautics, Inc., in Wayne, Pennsylvania. It weeds out unreliable and irrelevant information sources and provides users access to materials that were all produced by well-known and reputable publishers. Moreover, it comes with a "natural language" search system that doesn't require users to understand the arcane rules of "Boolean" logic. The cost is fairly modest: one hookup at an elementary school costs $750 a year, while a high school that wants enough capacity to accommodate 35 concurrent users would pay $2,900. But Infonautics admits to some disappointment with the slow growth of its subscriber base, which totaled just 10,500 in the fourth quarter of 1996. "As with many other companies offering products and services via the Internet, we are finding that subscription revenues from consumers are not developing as rapidly as we had hoped," says Marvin I. Weinberger, Infonautics' chairman and chief executive officer.
"It is not a giant encyclopedia, but I think that by teaching the students how to evaluate information we are teaching them a skill that they will use throughout their lives."
--Kathleen Schrock, Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District, Massachusetts
If a stronger market doesn't develop, schools may have to continue relying on the work of individuals for whom taming the Internet to meet the needs of education is largely a labor of love. Kathleen Schrock, department head for technology at the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, shows that one individual can add substantially to the efficiency and value of online searches by selecting and organizing useful references. Schrock, who started keeping track of useful Gopher sites on index cards in 1993, now carries links to more than 1,200 sites of interest to educators, as well as some original content, on her highly regarded web pages.
"I can usually find something about anything that a student asks for," says Schrock. But she describes the information as "value added" to print collections, not a substitute. And although she and a number of other school librarians have been developing criteria for students and teachers to use in evaluating websites for reliability, she says she still requires students to seek a print source, whenever possible, to verify information they obtain on the Internet.
"Depending on the subject, the Internet is a great place to start to find out both sides of an issue, introductory and detailed information, and those hard-to-find topics," Schrock says. "It is not a giant encyclopedia, but I think that by teaching the students how to evaluate information we are teaching them a skill that they will use throughout their lives."
Evaluating information is one of the higher-order skills that students must learn in the Information Age, according to teachers at the John Witherspoon Middle School, in Princeton, New Jersey. It is preceded by "gathering" and followed by "analyzing" and "presenting." Collectively, acquiring these skills adds up to learning how to think, the teachers say.
The Bellingham public schools have articulated even more higher-order skills. For instance, teachers there have broken down the research cycle into seven stages: questioning, planning, gathering, sorting and sifting, synthesizing, evaluating, and reporting. The schools have developed staff training modules for each skill, as well as "rubrics" for evaluating student performance on them.
McKenzie, the technology coordinator, puts special emphasis on the first stage. In questioning, the student clarifies what new insight is required, what he or she already knows, and what data and insight are required to shed light on the question. "Questioning is the primary technology to make meaning," he says. "Questioning converts data into information, and information into insight."
And how does a school know if it has succeeded in teaching students the various higher-order skills? The Oak Harbor School District, in Washington state, has developed a set of rubrics for measuring student progress on the various skills of the research cycle. A student would score a "5" in questioning, for instance, if she "discovers independently an issue or problem which needs a decision or solution," while she would get only a "1" if she "relies upon adults to state questions and topics." Similarly, a researcher would get a "5" for planning if he "selects high-quality sources independently and efficiently," but would be given a "1" if he "wanders from source to source without questioning which source will be most helpful." And coming up with an original decision or solution would merit a "5" in synthesizing, while simply restating the decisions and solutions of others would earn only a "1."
For teachers unsure how to apply these concepts, a growing number of lesson plans are available online. Often, the lessons involve collaboration and interdisciplinary study. In a "web quest" called Searching for China, for instance, students join teams whose mission is to make sense of China. Each must choose to play the role of foreign investor, human-rights worker, museum curator, state senator, or religious leader. Each then must read a dossier tailor-made for the role he or she chooses. After studying the materials, the interdisciplinary teams come together to "discuss, persuade, argue, deal, and brainstorm" a team action plan.
"We know the answers are not easy," the quest designers say. "That's why they are real! Attention: You are not `playing school.' The future could depend on you and your ability to understand and communicate."
Lesson plans may be helpful to students and teachers, but it's even more valuable for students to devise lesson plans for themselves. All the higher-order skills come into play--defining the question, gathering resources, sifting and sorting them, and figuring out how to present them in a way that is meaningful to somebody else. And the result is something of genuine value: high-quality student work helps fill the need for well-vetted content in the online world.
Mary O'Haver, a fifth-grade teacher at Fairland Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland, has made producing educational materials for other schools a major part of her curriculum. "From the beginning, our web space has been a place where we produce resources, not promote ourselves or our school," says O'Haver. "The emphasis has always been, and continues to be, about what value we are adding to the Internet." O'Haver's website has almost 200 student projects, most of which include documentation on how they were done. "I get email thanking me for projects students put up two years ago that other students are finding helpful in their own class work today," she says.
O'Haver says her students are impressed when they see commercial websites and realize people get paid for producing them. The fact that they, too, can produce something of real value--something that may be used by people far beyond the school's own walls--is a powerful motivator.
And the discipline that O'Haver forces on her students to take responsibility for their work can be a powerful lesson. She requires her students to use multiple sources when researching a project, including notes from four textbooks, two CD-ROMs, several books other than textbooks, and at least one website. "This [approach] helps students evaluate what they find on the Internet," she says.
Once, O'Haver says, her students were indignant when they found that textbooks said Ponce de Leon was born on one date while a website they found gave a different date. "If they're going to put it on the Internet, they should check their facts!" said one girl. In their own report, the children indicated there was conflicting information about de Leon's exact birthdate. "Now the kids are looking for mistakes," says O'Haver. "This has instilled in them a sense of pride in being sure that the information they put on the web does not have mistakes."
Because much of the educational material on the Internet is aimed at adults, O'Haver's students often repackage it for kids using larger fonts, simpler words, or more pictures. But some of the student work now available online is as sophisticated as any professional product. Students at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland, created Economics and Investment: A Stock Market Simulation, an award-winning primer on the stock market, complete with company profiles, a tutorial, and time-delayed market results that enable users to see how hypothetical investments would have performed in real life.
Developing new assessment tools
As the nation's investment in computer networking grows, measuring its educational impact has become increasingly important. "How do you assess whether this stuff actually does anything?" asks Ricardo Tostado, a policy analyst for the Illinois State Board of Education. "We need to see what this is accomplishing."
Numerous studies have failed to provide conclusive answers, and opinions on the issue vary widely. Nora Sabelli, a senior program officer at the National Science Foundation, believes there are tangible signs--namely, higher test scores--that computer networking is effective. "We know how long it takes to get test scores up, and why," she says.
But others aren't so sure. "We have yet to find evidence that the introduction of new technology in schools raises test scores," says the Abell Foundation's Kate Walsh. Even some advocates, like consultant Margaret Riel, concede that test scores don't prove the case for computer networking. "In general, people are not finding test-score differences," she says. "There is some disappointment in that."
The difference in interpretations stems in part from a methodological problem: it is very difficult to isolate the impact of technology from other changes, such as new teaching styles, that also affect student performance. In a seminal 1985 study Richard Clark, an education professor at the University of California Los Angeles, reviewed earlier studies that suggested computers improved student performance. Much of the supposed beneficial impact disappeared, he said, when the teacher or instructional method was held constant.
Clark also reported that short-term studies generally credited computers with having a bigger effect than studies tracking student performance over longer periods. This has led some analysts to conclude that much of the gain associated with computers may have resulted from the novelty of the new technology, rather than some underlying advantage.
"Educational media alone do not influence the achievement of students," say authors Ann D. Thompson, Michael R. Simonson, and Constance P. Hargrave in the Association for Educational Communications and Technology's exhaustive Educational Technology: A Review of the Research. "Media permit the delivery and storage of instructional messages but do not determine learning."
Reliance on standardized tests is another problem. While they can measure student mastery of discrete skills and factual knowledge, many analysts believe they don't adequately gauge whether students are acquiring higher-order skills such as the ability to solve complex problems, think analytically, synthesize information from diverse sources, and communicate effectively.
Riel pioneered some alternative assessment tools in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In one study she found that fourth-graders in California, Hawaii, Mexico, and Alaska who participated in an online news service called Computer Chronicles showed marked improvement in reading and writing skills compared with other students. Riel concluded that editing other students' writing is more effective than looking for one's own mistakes, and that students felt more comfortable editing the work of distant peers than that of their classmates.
Another study by Riel suggested that students perform better when they're given authentic tasks rather than make-work assignments. In the study judges were given two sets of papers written by Israeli students--some written for a student network and others for teachers. Without knowing for whom the papers were written, the judges found that writing done for peers used less slang, contained fewer errors, had more complex constructions, and was more substantive and supported more effectively by details.
Probably the most successful alternative tools for tracking a student's progress is "portfolio assessment," in which students demonstrate their achievement with samples of their work. An electronic version is now available: the Committee for Economic Development reports that Scholastic, Inc., has developed a system that teachers can use to scan into a computer samples of students' written work, video clips, and other information. With more and more students presenting their research findings in multimedia form, this should prove to be a useful new tool.
There are no tools for assessing the value of instruction that results in students being more fully engaged in their communities or developing friendships with kids on the other side of the world.
Still, alternative assessment tools have a long way to go in winning public acceptance. They rely on subjective evaluations more than standardized tests. And like the more complex phenomena they are designed to gauge, they are harder to reduce to simple, quantifiable scores.
Moreover, even portfolio assessment doesn't measure all the possible gains from new teaching techniques. How, for instance, does one gauge whether students are more motivated? According to the Committee for Economic Development, researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that high school students who enrolled in experimental physics courses that relied heavily on interactive videodisks, computer simulations, microcomputer-based laboratories, and multimedia activities did no better on tests than other students. But the kids from the experimental program enrolled in advanced physics classes at twice the rate other students did. The committee reported on those findings in Connecting Students to a Changing World: A Technology Strategy for Improving Mathematics and Science Education.
Finally, there are no tools for assessing the value of instruction that results in students being more fully engaged in their communities or developing friendships with kids on the other side of the world. "We are doing everybody a disservice if we focus exclusively on test scores," says the National Science Foundation's Sabelli.
Supporting professional development for teachers
Inadequate teacher training is perhaps the biggest bottleneck limiting effective use of computer networking in many of the nation's classrooms. Although years ago some computer enthusiasts may have imagined that computers would take over many of the tasks of teachers, or that many classroom teachers would see their role subordinated to master teachers in central locations who could reach millions of students using distance-learning tools, it is now widely accepted that technology actually puts more demands than ever on classroom teachers.
There are several reasons for this. Learning the mechanics of using hardware and new software is just one challenge. More difficult yet, teachers say, is developing lesson plans that incorporate the resources available over the Internet into the school curriculum. In addition, teachers accustomed to teacher-centered classrooms have to learn a new set of techniques to manage the transition to student-centered learning. And as individual students seek and find knowledge from an ever-wider array of sources, rather than simply absorbing a uniform body of knowledge, teachers often find that they must be more knowledgeable than ever about their particular subject matter to respond to student questions and help direct their research. "Teachers are nearly unanimous in concluding that, in the early stages of technology implementation, at least, their job becomes harder," concluded Barbara Means one of the authors of the Department of Education-sponsored report, Using Technology to Support Education Reform.
Despite these findings, most schools cut corners on training. In a 1995 report, Teachers and Technology: Making the Connection, the now-closed Office of Technology Assessment suggested that schools should be devoting at least 30 percent of their technology spending to training. But Quality Education Data, the Denver-based research firm, estimated that school districts are devoting only 5 percent of their technology budgets to training in the 1996-97 school year. Moreover, just 13 percent of public schools require teachers to obtain training in advanced telecommunications, according to the National Commission on Educational Statistics, and while some schools offer teachers incentives to seek training on their own, 51 percent leave the matter entirely up to teachers.
Traditional training methods are unlikely to fill the gap any time soon. The Office of Technology Assessment found that most teacher-training programs at colleges make little use of technology. And it said that the typical approach to in-service teacher training--short courses on specific computer applications or other single topics--may be particularly ineffective in preparing teachers to use computer networking in their classrooms. As most computer users can testify, learning a new software program requires hands-on practice. Continuing support from a good mentor is also important, yet only 6 percent of elementary schools and just 3 percent of secondary schools employed full-time computer coordinators in 1992.
"Teachers are nearly unanimous in concluding that, in the early stages of technology implementation, at least, their job becomes harder."
--Barbara Means, co-author, Using Technology to Support Education Reform
Even when teachers get training in the fundamentals of using computers, they often don't get assistance in figuring out how to use them in their courses. Jamieson McKenzie, the technology director for the Bellingham public schools, recalls visiting one school that had separate computer labs for the sciences, social studies, and English--and faculty who were better trained than their peers at most schools. But even though the business education teachers all knew how to use spreadsheets, he says, "when I asked them how they would use spreadsheets in class, no one had any idea."
While traditional training could help teachers make better use of technology, veterans of the education technology movement say teachers can learn better--and at lower cost--from each other. Many successful schools incorporate technology discussions into their weekly faculty meetings. Clear View Charter School in Chula Vista, California, for instance, holds technology hours every Friday afternoon. They invariably are well attended. "We share student work, evaluating teaching by the quality of students' work," says principal Ginger Hovenic.
Teachers who go online can find even more help, including a wide range of resources, discussion groups, lesson plans, and other teachers eager to exchange ideas or launch collaborative learning projects. Once a teacher knows enough to tap into these resources, training can become easier.
But another problem arises. "The biggest issue teachers constantly raise is the time issue," says Margaret Honey, deputy director of the Center for Children and Technology in New York. "They're tremendously enthused about all the resources [available on the Internet], but finding the ones that are going to be useful to your curriculum can suck up hours of time."
Ultimately, the time problem may be harder for school districts to address than providing basic training, because the solution may involve a substantial, continuing expense. The Department of Education argues in a report entitled Prisoners of Time that schools should employ more substitute teachers to give regular classroom teachers more time to prepare lesson plans.
"This isn't specific to technology," says Kristi Rennebohm Franz, a teacher at Sunnyside Elementary in Pullman, Washington. "But it would make an incredible difference if the substitute teachers who replaced us during our release time were always the same people. This would provide consistency to the students, ease the job of the substitute, and provide greater peace of mind to the released teacher."
Policies concerning technology in schools have assumed special urgency because uneven access to computer networks may be contributing to the widening income gap between the rich and the poor.
In 1994 the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans accounted for 46 percent of national income, while the poorest 20 percent earned just 4 percent, according to Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Wage differentials have increased partly because demand for high-skilled workers is rising more rapidly than demand for low-skilled ones. Harvard economists David Autor and Lawrence Katz, along with Alan Krueger of Princeton, found in a March 1997 analysis that workplaces where computers are used account for as much as half of the relative increase in demand for high-skilled workers since 1970.
To the extent that computer skills are important in today's labor market, middle-class kids have a distinct advantage. In July 1996 Nielsen Media Research reported that households with income of $50,000 or more account for 47 percent of all personal computers, even though they represent just 29 percent of the overall population. Similarly, Nielsen said that such families account for 56 percent of all households with Internet access.
Government programs--especially Title I, which provides funds to schools with disadvantaged students--have eased the imbalance somewhat. In the 1993-94 school year, for instance, schools where 80 percent or more of their students were eligible for Title I had one computer for every 26 students, while schools where just 20 percent of students were eligible for Title I had one computer for every 13 students, according to Quality Education Data. But by the 1995-96 school year the gap had narrowed substantially, with the poorest schools reporting one computer for every 13 students, and the wealthiest one for every 10 students.
Some analysts, however, worry that the government could use technology funding as an excuse to skirt equally important problems. In a number of states governors are seeking big increases in technology spending even as they propose cuts in overall school aid. The tradeoff could be particularly harmful for poor schools, which tend to be older and in worse condition than rich ones. A 1995 report by the General Accounting Office, for instance, found that 60 percent of schools in central cities, which serve predominantly poor student populations, had insufficient phone lines, electrical wiring, or electrical power to support communications technologies, compared with 47 percent of schools in rural areas and small towns.
"We get reports--not data, but anecdotal evidence--of computers being donated to poor districts, but the computers are antiques, the districts have no funds to train anyone, and the districts don't have networks," says Craig Foster, executive director of the Equity Center, an advocacy group that represents 375 Texas school districts. "People tell us that they have seen rooms in poor schools with stacks and stacks of computers because they have no way to hook them up."
That helps explain why poorer schools are less likely to be connected to the Internet than wealthy ones. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that Internet access is available in just 53 percent of schools where more than 70 percent of students are eligible for the government's free or reduced lunch program, while 78 percent of the schools with less than 11 percent of eligible students are connected.
"However you look at it, you cannot assume that a school that is technology-rich and resource-poor is as good as a school that is technology-rich and resource-rich," American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chris Hansen told Education Week in a March 1996 report examining the issue of technology and equity in schools.
The equity question is far more complex than just a matter of hardware and funding, though. "Children in urban schools and children in suburban schools have a very different sense of self-efficacy when it comes to technology," says Louis M. Gomez, an associate professor of education and computer science at Northwestern University. "What I've come to understand of this problem is that it's about a culture in schools. There are urban schools that have access and still don't use the technology. It is because there is no culture of use."
Gomez says that the use of technology is a function of local culture and a community's "capacity for change," and that we shouldn't expect the same kind of computer use in all schools. But if computer technology really does shape one's prospects for success later in life, different patterns of use would be a matter of grave concern. Some reports in the early 1990s, for instance, suggested that students in wealthier schools are more likely to use computers to develop higher-order skills, while kids in poorer districts use them more frequently for repetitious drill-and-practice routines. "Economically disadvantaged students, who often use the computer for remediation and basic skills, learn to do what the computer tells them, while more affluent students, who use it to learn programming and tool applications, learn to tell the computer what to do," wrote Delia Neuman, associate professor at the University of Maryland College of Library and Information Services.
Unless disadvantaged students are introduced to more challenging uses of computers, they may be consigned to a new technological underclass, warned Charles Piller in a widely cited 1992 report published by the magazine Macworld. "Those who cannot claim computers as their own tool for exploring the world never grasp the power of technology," he said. "Such students become passive consumers of electronic information. . . . Once out of school, they are relegated to low-wage jobs where they may operate electronic cash registers or bar-code readers. They may catch on as data-entry clerks, typing page after page in deadly monotony. They are controlled by technology as adults--just as drill-and-practice routines controlled them as students."
There has been little additional research on this issue since Neuman and Piller published their findings. It's possible the situation has changed. Considering the potential ramifications, it should be a high priority for future research. Says Neuman: "It's clear we aren't giving this issue attention commensurate with its importance."
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Last updated: 21 July 1997 jss
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