Voices From The Field

The MSP News last week noted that the new OECD report on “students, computers and learning” has been added to the MSPnet library (also you can link to it here ).  It has received only a little coverage in this country;  I first came across it through the BBC news website, which had a fairly full story about it.  It is worth reading at least the executive summary, if you’re interested in technology in education.  The long and the short of it is that, using the PISA scores as a guide, there is no evidence that adding more technology in the classroom (whether in terms of student/computer ratios, or Internet connectivity, or other ways of “adding”) has improved student learning in any of the ways that it’s been assumed that they would.  Indeed, one provocative finding is that “in countries where it is less common for students to use the Internet at school for school work, students’ performance in reading improved more rapidly than in countries where such use is more common, on average.”  (pg 146).

More generally, positive impact on students tends to show  a “hill-shaped” pattern:  Low use or access, is associated with less improvement in reading, math or other of the measured skills;  moderate use is associated with moderate improvement;  high use is associated with poorer results. (This is reminiscent of patterns seen in many ecological settings, where an increase in a  resource or disturbance like grazing may be associated with increases in some measure such as species richness — up to a point, beyond which the positive trends are reversed).

The outcomes of this study should not be a surprise, on the basis of research on (or personal experience of) large-scale ed tech.  In some cases, with some teachers, and under certain conditions, technology can offer real and exciting benefits. Such benefits are not automatic, and are not associated with the technology alone (separate from systemic factors inside and outside the classroom).  The people who talk in the jargon of “socio-technical” systems have it about right.

Larry Cuban, in a trenchant blog post about this study,  points out that as the evidence of the complex relationship between ed tech and learning becomes clear, and the glib assumptions that more technology will be “the answer” to “world class education,” advocates more and more often fall back on the argument that schools have to be high tech, and therefore school life has to be cast in a technology rich mold, for utilitarian, “workforce” reasons.  Or else we hear that schools have to be high tech because the world is high tech. The BBC article on the OECD study says:

Mark Chambers, chief executive of Naace, the body supporting the use of computers in schools, said it was unrealistic to think schools should reduce their use of technology.  “It is endemic in society now, at home young people will be using technology, there’s no way that we should take technology out of schools, schools should be leading not following.”

Yet technology is expensive to install, expensive to maintain, and expensive in time and talent (and money) for educators to incorporate into effective practice.  I have seen it done very well, but it’s not easy, and requires a systemic dedication beyond the classroom — and judicious choices administrators, teachers, parents, and every other participant in the school ecosystem.   Voices of urgency about the adoption of ed tech tend to have economic or “market” accents.  “Innovation” and “technology” are rarely far apart in their discourse, and that implies necessarily “purchasing.”   Joanne Weiss, a top advisor to Ed. Secretary Duncan, wrote in the Harvard Business Review (h/t to Diane Ravitch for this reference):

One of the most poignant summaries of the market for innovative technology solutions in education is that it is forever in its infancy….large urban and suburban districts… are notoriously weak consumers….If we can match highly-effective educators with great entrepreneurs and if we can direct smart capital towards these projects, the market for technological innovation might just spurt from infancy into adolescence.

Weiss of course writes about the need for research to establish which innovations (=technologies = products) are effective, but the educational concern is cast in market language, as so much of the coverage of the “education industry.”

Larry Cuban has a follow-on blog post, which wonders why there has been so little press about the OECD report, at least in this country (some of his commenters tell us that on the continent there’s been  more).  At bottom, the role of technology in education (I do not say “education reform,” that other industrial project) is complex, contingent, uncertain.  We cannot evaluate as fast as designers can design, nor marketers market, nor installers install.  Inquiry, education-as-inquiry, inquiry about education, has to travel at a different tempo — the tempo of teaching and learning, which has its own integrity.