Conclusions

Large-scale surveys of teachers, such as the one providing data for this analysis, can only provide suggestions about the kinds of forces that lead teachers to use resources like computer technology to different extents and in different ways. The numerical precision of these descriptions and analyses should not be mistaken for certitude. Yet many of the findings about academic subject-matter teachers in middle and high school would probably withstand the test of having alternative empirical approaches applied to them.

Frequent use of computers by middle and high school teachers and their students in math, science, social studies, and English is, as Larry Cuban argues, still very much a rare phenomenon. Outside of word processing, very few teachers have their students make frequent use of computers during class. Students in lower-ability classes are often given computer games and drills related to the subject area of their class, but it is primarily those rare classes of other students and other teachers who use more sophisticated computer software as resources and tools for doing productive and constructive academic work. The teachers’ philosophy of education certainly plays a role in determining whether she will use computers and how they will be used, but there are even stronger factors at work in determining whether teachers will make use of computers during class time for constructivist learning approaches. Specifically, those stronger factors are the teacher’s own technical expertise and professional experience in using computer applications, the number of computers in their own classroom, and their personal involvement in their profession, both within their school building and beyond. Each of those factors, explored only in a small way in this paper, appear to be stronger determinants of constructivist uses of computers during class than the teacher’s philosophy itself.

Will computers continue to play a “niche” role in the academic education of secondary students? Cuban continues to believe that that is so (Cuban, 2001); however, with continued development of the capability of computer hardware, the Internet infrastructure, and applications software; with increasing numbers of classrooms having sufficient computer access to this technology; with the increasing experience and expertise of teachers in using computers; and with the facilitating influence of the teachers most professionally active among their peers, the niche may be growing. The final and critical piece may yet turn out to be teachers’ philosophies of learning and teaching and whether they can be brought around to be supportive of constructivist applications of computer technology. One thing, however, is certain. Four, eight, twelve, and sixteen years from now, there will be new mantras about the way computers should be used in schools, and they will take us as far from those of today—about computers as the tool for instructional reform—as today’s ideas are from 1982’s “Teach BASIC: it’s the language that comes with your computer.”