Kathleen Fulton on Evaluating the Effectiveness of Educational Technology
BBr...@aol.com
Do educational technologies work? This is the question asked by the press,
parents, and education policymakers at all levels. While it's a simple
question, and an extremely important one, answering it is far from simple.
It's almost the equivalent of saying "Do textbooks work?" Yes, some textbooks
"work," in some conditions, with some teachers, with some students, but these
same textbooks may not "work" in another educational context. Clearly the
question of technology effectiveness requires us to be clear in what results
we seek, how we measure success, and how we define effectiveness.
Our past answers to the technology effectiveness question have been framed by
our views of what education should be about, and the ways we have applied
technology to meet those goals. For example, those working from a behaviorist
model look to technology to help in building basic skills that can be tested
on standardized achievement tests. Much of the drill and practice software
promoted over the last decade has come with claims that it will bring
improvements in student scores on these tests. And meta-analyses of computer-
based instruction suggest that technology has been effective in helping
students learn more, in less time, and with more enthusiasm.
But even this picture is not a simple cause and effect relationship. The
technology doesn't teach the skills; rather, it has shown value in providing
the opportunity for sustained practice (with rewards for success) that
students need for developing fluency as skills become ingrained. But, it's
fair to ask, isn't this an awfully expensive substitute for the flashcards and
workbooks that worked for those of us who were schooled B.C. (Before
Computers)?
<A HREF="http://millennium.aed.org/fulton.shtml">Kathleen Fulton on
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Educational Technology</A>
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The recent ETS study, Does it Compute? The Relationship Between Educational
Technology and Student Achievement in Mathematics reported in ED Week's
Technology Counts '98 frames the issue of "what works" in a new light. This
study confirms what many of us have been saying for a long time, it's not how
much you use computers that matters, but how. In correlating 4th and 8th grade
students' scores on the 1996 NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational
Progress) with data on classroom computer use, ETS's Walinsky suggests that
some ways of using technology (i.e. simulations and applications or
math/learning games) are more effective than others (i.e. drill and practice).
A more challenging issue revolves around the use of technologies for
developing higher order skills of problem-solving, and the ability to access,
organize, display, and communicate information. Ironically, while these are
tasks computers were designed to improve in the "real world," they are the
components least likely to be measured on standardized tests in school! Today,
however, many school reform efforts are promoting a different set of goals
than skill development.
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Bonnie