|
Teaching, Learning and Computing:
1998 A National Survey of
Schools and Teachers Describing Their
Best Practices, Teaching Philosophies, and Uses of Technology |
Report to Participants
Revised September 21, 1999
Jason L. Ravitz
YanTien Wong
Henry Jay Becker
Research
Staff:
Henry Jay (Hank) Becker, Jason Ravitz, Margaret M.
Riel, YanTien (Yani) Wong
University of California Irvine • Department of
Education • 2001 Berkeley Place •
Irvine, CA 92697
Ronald E. Anderson, Amy Ronnkvist, Sara Dexter
University of Minnesota • 909 Social Science Building • Minneapolis, MN 55455
E-mail us at tlc@uci.edu or visit our
web site at: http://www.crito.uci.edu/TLC.
Study Endorsers:
International Society for
Technology in Education (ISTE),
National Education Association (NEA),
American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Association of
Elementary School Principals (NAESP), National Association of Secondary School
Principals (NASSP), Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), American Association of School
Administrators (AASA), National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA),
National School Boards Association (NSBA), Council of Chief State School
Officers (CCSSO), Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), National Science
Teachers Association (NSTA), National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), National
Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)
Research funded by the National Science Foundation and the
Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education
INTRODUCTION
Teaching, Learning, and Computing (TLC) is the Spring, 1998 national survey in which teachers, technology coordinators, and principals described their best instructional practices, teaching philosophies, and uses of computing technologies. Roughly 5,800 educators in over 1,100 schools across the U.S. shared information about such things as how often they gave different kinds of assignments, the types of software they had students use, and the level of support present for using computers. The survey included a nationally representative sample of 2,251 4th through 12th grade teachers in American schools as well as more than 1,800 other teachers from two targeted samples of schools – schools with the greatest presence of computer technology and schools that participate in one of more than 50 identified national or regional educational reform programs. More than 1,700 principals and school-level technology coordinators also made valuable contributions by characterizing the school context for these teachers’ practices.
In this report to the educators who participated in the study, we share our findings about the availability and use of computers by teachers and their students, the prevalence of different philosophies and instructional practices, and the relationships between how teachers use computers and their general approach to teaching. We examine differences among teachers by subject-matter and school levels, the two variables that have the biggest impact on the way teachers practice their craft. In addition, we contrast teachers who are oriented primarily to their own classroom with teachers who frequently interact with colleagues in collaborative and leadership activities. We also report on how experiences like formal staff development workshops and informal contacts among teachers affect their computer use and their pedagogy. Finally, we also share some preliminary results that contrast teachers in high-technology or reform-oriented settings with the teachers from the representative national sample.
Details regarding survey and statistical methods are not included in this report, but can be found on the project web site: http://www.crito.uci.edu/TLC. All of the other analyses from the TLC survey that could not be incorporated into this Report to Participants, including a study of how school investments in technology hardware, software, and support affect computer use, will also make their way to the project web site over the course of 1999. Many of the topics for these future analyses are outlined at the end of this report.
This report is divided into four parts, as follows:
· Part 1 addresses the availability of computers and the Internet to teachers and their use of these technology resources both for their own professional purposes and as part of the work their students do. We look at how frequently computers are used in general and with different types of software, and how teachers use computers and the Internet in different ways according to the subject and level they teach.
· Part 2 discusses differences in pedagogical beliefs and practices among teachers, with a focus on those beliefs and practices that are consistent with a reform-orientation predicated on a “constructivist” view of learning. We describe the frequency of different teaching practices, by subject, and then look at some reasons why some teachers have more of a reform-orientation than others do.
· Part 3 examines the relationship between technology use and reform-oriented practices, and whether computers and the Internet might be serving as catalysts for changes in teachers pedagogies.
· Part 4 presents a few findings from our preliminary analysis of the sample of high-technology and reform-oriented schools in our study, and how teachers in those schools differ from our representative national sample of teachers.
PART 1: AVAILABILITY AND USE OF COMPUTERS
Year by year, greater numbers of ever more powerful computers make their arrival in American schools and classrooms and in the homes of teachers and their students. More and more teachers have access to computers for their own use—in their own classrooms, in teachers’ lounges, and at their own home. By last Spring (1998), more than 3/5 of all teachers (62%) had a desktop computer provided by their school for their own use while at school. Even among teachers who had no computers in their room for student use, a majority (53%) had a computer provided for their professional use.
Regardless of whether teachers have students use computers during class time, they are computer-users themselves. Over 88% of U.S. teachers across all subjects and school levels report computer use for professional purposes. Weekly or more often, 66% use computers to make handouts, 50% use computers to record or calculate grades, 43% use them to write lesson plans, 28% use them to get information or pictures from the Internet for lessons, and 23% use computers to correspond with parents. At least occasionally, 39% of teachers exchange computer files with one another, 31% use camcorders or digital cameras and 19% use computers to post student work, ideas and opinions and locations for resources on the World Wide Web.
Nevertheless, having a computer available for themselves is one thing, but having a sufficient number of computers available for the students in their class is another. Even though 51% of teachers had at least one computer in their classroom for students to use, only one teacher out of thirteen (7.8%) had 8 or more computers in their own classroom, and roughly the same number of teachers (10.5%) had between 4 and 7 computers. Since more than two-thirds of all teachers use computers with at least one of the classes they teach, that means that the vast majority of computer-using classes have to either operate with just a few classroom computers or do their computer work elsewhere in the school.
Which teachers have the greatest access to computing resources?
Generally, the teachers with the greatest access to computers, for themselves and for their students, are those who teach classes about computers and those who teach classes where students apply computer skills to adult tasks in business and industry. More than 80% of computer teachers and vocational teachers and 65% of business education teachers have a computer provided by their school for their own use. These are also the teachers who are best positioned to have whole classes of students use computers simultaneously.
Looking first at computer-to-student ratios in their own classroom, computer teachers, business education teachers, and vocational education teachers—along with secondary teachers of mixed academic subjects—were much more likely than any other teachers to have at least one computer for every four students. More than 80% of computer teachers, 67% of business education teachers and 23% of vocational teachers had at least one computer in their classroom for every four students enrolled. In comparison, only 14% of English teachers, 12% of math teachers, 7% of science teachers, 5% of elementary teachers, and just 2% of social studies teachers taught in classrooms with that many computers.
Yet
it is having many computers in one place that makes it possible for teachers to
use computers in a substantial way with their classes. Those who don’t have access to a bank of
computer stations in some location tend simply to do without student computer
use at all. We found that 80% of
teachers who have their students use computers do so in a room where there is
at least one computer for every four students (most often a computer lab or
media center). This is true for almost every subject. Where the teachers of different subjects differ is in where they
find this access—in their own room or elsewhere. That difference in location, we found, has important consequences
for how much their students use computers at all. We discuss that below.
Assigning Students to Use Computers
Across all subjects, 70% of all teachers report having students in at least one of their classes use computers during class at some point during the school year. However, infrequent use of a resource like computers is not likely to have a great effect on most students, so perhaps a more useful measure of the penetration of computers into organized school instruction would be the proportion of teachers whose students use computers on a frequent basis. Using a criterion of use by a “typical” student in the class on more than 20 occasions during the school year (teachers completed the survey in the late Spring), we found that more than one-fourth of teachers from 4th through 12th grades could be termed “frequent computer-assigning teachers.”
However, variations across subjects are striking. The first column of numbers in Table 1 below shows that for computer classes (90%) and business education classes (69%), a majority of teachers reported their students to be using computers on more than 20 occasions. Also a substantial fraction of vocational education teachers (42%), teachers of self-contained classes (42%), and English or language arts teachers (32%) have their students use computers frequently. At the other extreme, only between 5 and 15 percent of teachers of science, math, social studies, foreign language, and fine arts classes are frequent computer-assigning teachers, using this definition.
Frequent computer use can be looked at in another way—from the “pie-chart” viewpoint: That is, among all of the classes for which computers were used by most students on more than 20 occasions—call these “frequent computer-using classes”—what fraction of them are math classes, science classes, computer classes, and so on? The three right-most columns in Table 1 present that data separately for elementary, middle, and high school levels. In secondary schools as a whole, more “frequent student computer use” occurs in English classes than in any other subject—including computer classes. That is because at any one time, only a modest fraction of students are taking computer classes, but nearly every student is taking English. However, considering high schools only, frequent computer use occurs as often in business education classes as in English, and computer classes are a close third. It is in the middle grades where English is far ahead of the second most-common class for frequent computer use—which is mathematics.
Table 1: Frequent Computer
Use by Students, by Subject Taught
|
|
Percent of teachers of that subject having students (“a typical student”) use computers in 20+ lessons during
class time |
Percent of all frequent
computer-assigning teachers at that level |
||
|
|
Elementary grades (4+) |
Middle grades |
High school grades |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Computer subjects |
90% |
1% |
15% |
16% |
|
Business education |
69% |
0% |
4% |
19% |
|
Vocational education |
43% |
0% |
3% |
13% |
|
Self-contained
(elementary) |
42% |
77% |
10% |
2% |
|
English, Lang. Arts spec. |
32% |
12% |
27% |
19% |
|
Science |
15% |
0% |
12% |
12% |
|
Mathematics |
13% |
3% |
16% |
4% |
|
Social studies |
11% |
3% |
5% |
5% |
|
Fine arts |
9% |
0% |
1% |
3% |
|
Foreign language |
5% |
0% |
0% |
2% |
|
Other subjects |
--- |
5% |
7% |
6% |
|
Total, all teachers |
27% |
100% |
100% |
100% |
Source: Teaching, Learning and Computing – 1998. http://www.crito.uci.edu/TLC
Interestingly, high school math classes constitute only a tiny fraction of the frequent computer use classes at that level.
In addition to “numbers,” where computers are located is also important. Because computer labs have so many more computers than classrooms—the typical lab has 21 computers; the typical classroom has only 2—it would seem that a student would have more of a chance to use computers frequently if his class used computers in a lab. However, having to share the computer lab with other teachers limits each teacher’s opportunity to use such resources frequently. How does this tradeoff play out?
The answer is that despite the presence of so few computers in most classrooms, students are more likely to be frequent computer users when their teacher has them do that work in the classroom rather than only in a computer lab or media center. This finding is not caused by the heavy-using teachers of computer and business-ed classes being the ones with computers in their classroom. In fact, the advantage of classroom location is strongest for academic subjects. English, science, social studies, and math teachers all are more apt to have their students use computers frequently when the use occurs in the teacher’s own classroom than when it occurs only in a computer lab or media center. For example, among English teachers, 57% of classroom-based computer using teachers frequently assign computer work compared to only 36% who have all computer work done in the lab or library.
The pattern is even stronger when one considers just those secondary academic subject teachers who have at least 5 computers in their classroom. That group of teachers is three times as likely to have students use computers frequently than are teachers of the same subjects whose students use computers only in labs or elsewhere (75% vs. 25%).
This seems counter intuitive since being in a lab with 20 to 30 computers would seem to give individual students more opportunities to use them. However, the computer’s value in most academic classes is not for concentrated whole-class use on a scheduled basis, but as a resource available for particular groups of students when needed to find information, analyze information, or communicate information.
Commonly Used Software
Studies of instructional uses of school computers conducted in the 1980’s or early in the 1990’s found that the primary uses of computer technology in schools involved skills practice and computer literacy (e.g., how to use different types of software). We can report now that those uses are no longer the most common ones. Instead, we are seeing large numbers of teachers having their students use computers as tools for searching for and obtaining information, analyzing information, communicating ideas, and producing intellectual products.
Of all of the various types of software available on school computers, word processing software is by far the most commonly used. Not only are English teachers more likely to have their students do word processing than any other computer activity, but so are science, social studies, and elementary teachers. Among elementary classes, games for practicing basic math and language arts skills are still common (second only to word processing). However in middle schools drills and games are used less
Table 2: Percent of teachers
using Software Used in 3+ Lessons, by Subject Taught
|
|
Word Proc. |
CD-ROM |
World Wide Web |
Skill practice Games |
Simulations/ Exploratory Environments |
Graphics |
Spread-sheets/ Database |
Presen-tation |
Multi-media |
E-mail |
|
Computers |
87% |
33% |
48% |
35% |
48% |
55% |
66% |
45% |
22% |
16% |
|
Business Educ |
86% |
22% |
37% |
23% |
32% |
40% |
63% |
34% |
5% |
13% |
|
Vocational |
41% |
30% |
35% |
16% |
41% |
37% |
24% |
23% |
11% |
13% |
|
Self-contained
(elementary) |
69% |
56% |
24% |
63% |
36% |
27% |
8% |
7% |
10% |
8% |
|
English |
60% |
42% |
34% |
18% |
12% |
17% |
8% |
11% |
7% |
6% |
|
Science |
41% |
36% |
35% |
11% |
22% |
16% |
17% |
8% |
8% |
8% |
|
Math |
15% |
9% |
16% |
25% |
18% |
8% |
13% |
6% |
4% |
2% |
|
Social Studies |
38% |
33% |
31% |
14% |
12% |
12% |
11% |
16% |
11% |
9% |
|
Fine Arts |
22% |
9% |
20% |
3% |
12% |
28% |
8% |
12% |
7% |
8% |
|
Foreign Language |
32% |
17% |
32% |
16% |
5% |
13% |
9% |
2% |
8% |
3% |
|
Total (incl. ‘other’) |
50% |
36% |
29% |
28% |
23% |
21% |
16% |
12% |
9% |
7% |
Source: Teaching, Learning and Computing – 1998, http://www.crito.uci.edu/TLC.
than CD-ROM reference software and Web browsers and in high schools drill and game software is also less common than graphics software, spreadsheets, simulation and exploratory software, and computer-aided presentations (e.g., PowerPoint).
Math teachers, however, use skills-practice games more than any other type of software (except perhaps for graphing software, which was not in that survey question). Table 2 shows the percentage of teachers, by subject, who reported having their students use each of 10 different types of software on at least three occasions during the year.
Next to using word processing software to compose and edit text, the greatest use that students are making of school computers is for gathering information. Students are obtaining information from CD-ROM encyclopedias and subject-specific reference CDs as well as information on the Internet’s World Wide Web. The more controlled information bases on CD-ROMs are particularly common in elementary classes’ information gathering (research), but in secondary schools the World Wide Web is used at least as often as CD-ROMs in English classes, social studies classes, and science classes. However, the most common use of the Internet is in computer classes and business education classes where students are using the Web to do research for reports.
Use of analytic software—such as simulations and exploratory environments and spreadsheets—and product-oriented software—such as graphics programs, presentation software, and multimedia authoring environments—are less often used than either word processing or information retrieval software. Nevertheless, most computer classes provide students with opportunities to explore those types of software as do many courses in business and vocational education. In many ways, it is the more elective and less college preparatory-oriented parts of the high school curriculum where the newer and more creative uses of computers are being found, rather than in the more standards-constrained academic subjects. Even in the elective classes, though, regular student use of electronic mail communication is a relatively rare phenomenon. Computer-based communication is not yet integrated into any area of the school experience on a widespread basis.
Staff Development and Support for Teachers’ Use of Computers
As with any new and complex teaching resource, it is important for teachers to have well-constructed opportunities to become competent in the use of software and to solve problems that arise in its use. How widespread are those opportunities? Our survey found that one half of all teachers participated in formal staff development activities related to computer technology and software during that school year or the previous summer. Most commonly, teachers attend workshops where the mechanics of using computers or software is a central topic. Somewhat less often they participate in programs that emphasize the integration of computer activities into subject-matter curriculum.
The teachers who most often participate in staff development workshops about computers, not surprisingly, are teachers of subjects that use computers most often. About 70% of business education and computer teachers attended staff development on computer mechanics during 1997-98. Vocational education teachers and teachers of mixed academic classes were next most often involved (57% of each). Teachers least likely to be included in technology-related staff development were fine arts teachers (29%).
However, also with reasonably high participation rates in staff development on computer mechanics were two groups of teachers who are rarely found among frequent computer-assigning teachers—mathematics teachers and foreign language teachers. What is interesting about those two groups is that, of all participants involved in technology-related staff development, teachers in those subjects (along with fine arts teachers), were the least likely to have workshops where the integration of technology with their subject-matter was a central topic. Instead, they were mainly presented with instruction in the mechanics of using technology. Thus, while math and foreign language teachers have had some opportunities to learn about technology, critical experiences for linking that learning to concrete teaching tasks have been missing.
Overall, 38% of teachers report that at least once a month they need help in integrating computers into a lesson they are planning. Of those teachers who report such a need, only 15% claim to always get it, and only 12% more say that support is “mostly” available. Thus, the need for help in curriculum integration, while not frequent for most teachers, is being met for only about one-third of those teachers who report a need for it. When the support comes, fewer than one-fourth say that the support is either excellent or very good.
Roughly the same story exists with respect to technical support—keeping computers and software available and working. Slightly fewer than one-half of all teachers (46%) say that they need technical help at least once a month. However, of those who report that level of need, only about one-third (31%) report that technical support is always or mostly available when they need it. About one-third of all teachers report that technical help, when called, is excellent or very good. About one-third say it is “good,” and one-third give it a lower grade (fair or poor).
High school teachers are less likely to report a need for technical or curriculum integration support for technology than are teachers in the lower grades. However, among those reporting a need for support, high school teachers are somewhat less likely to say it is always or mostly available than are middle school and elementary teachers. This holds even when we eliminate computer specialists from the analysis.
Availability and Use of Internet
The presence of the Internet has become pervasive in recent years. As of last Spring, more than 90% of schools had some level of access to the Internet. More importantly, in our survey nearly 40% of all 4th through 12th grade teachers had access in their own classroom, and nearly one-half of those teachers (18% of all teachers) had LAN-based connections to the Internet in their classroom. Those “direct” connections would allow many computers to be simultaneously connected to the Internet if the teachers had those computers in their classrooms.
Just as there are many teachers who use computers professionally but do not have students use them during class, more teachers use the Internet for professional purposes than assign its use to students. More than two-thirds of all teachers (68%) indicated that in 1997-98 they at least occasionally used the Internet to gather information and pictures for use in classes, and more than one-fourth (28%) said they did so on a weekly basis. In addition, a growing fraction of teachers e-mail teachers from other schools (16% said they did this more than a handful of times during the year) and share opinions, lesson plans, or student work on the Internet (18% did some of this).
With respect to student use, as we have already pointed out, having students use a World Wide Web browser for research has become the third most common student use of school computers after word processing and CD-ROMs. Relatively few teachers, though, have students use the Internet in complex ways such as publishing on the Web or long-term cross-classroom collaborative projects. Overall, only 7% of U.S. teachers had students use e-mail in as many as three lessons during 1997-98, only 6% had students participate in cross-school projects, and only 4% had students “become expert about a topic and publish text and pictures on the Web.” Still, that means that even for limited participation activities such as Web publishing, the absolute numbers of teachers and students involved is impressive. For example, by Spring 1998 more than 70,000 teachers had helped students disseminate their work via the World Wide Web.
Internet Use by Subject Matter and School Level
Although many teachers have had students do some research using the World Wide Web, only a small proportion of teachers have made Web-based research a major activity in their classes—that is, where students used the Web frequently throughout the school year. The leaders in this activity, not surprisingly, are computer teachers. In 1997-98, about 40% of all teachers of computer classes had students do research on the Web as part of 10 or more lessons during the year. For most other subject areas, though, only 10 to 15 percent of teachers had students use the Web that frequently. Science teachers were a bit more likely than teachers of other academic subjects to have students involved in frequent use of the Web (21%). The lowest levels of participation were among math, foreign language, and fine arts teachers (all under 10%). As a group, high school teachers have students do Web research, e-mail, and Web publication more frequently than teachers at lower levels. On the other hand, elementary school teachers have students use the Internet for collaborative projects slightly more often than teachers in secondary schools.
Major Determinants of Internet Use With Students
In one of our special studies we examined the following question: “Which factors are most strongly predictive of a high level of Internet use by teachers?” We found that the most important predictors of Internet use are Internet connections in the classroom, the teacher’s computer expertise, and the teacher's pedagogical beliefs and practices.
Classroom Connectivity. The highest level of student use, whether it involved student research or students posting their work on the Web, is reported by those teachers who have high-speed/LAN-based direct access in their own classroom—and where at least four computers are present. That situation allows several students to have Web access at one time and facilitates integration of Web research with other related classroom activities that don’t involve computers. Overall, just about one-half (48%) of all teachers who have 4 or more computers in their classroom and have direct LAN-based (local-area-network) Internet connections had students use the Web during 10 or more lessons during the year. That is double the percentage of those who had students use the Web who had only individual dial-up modem connections or who had LAN-based connections but with fewer computers. English and social studies teachers with that highest level of connectivity were particularly likely to organize many lessons around Web-based student research.
Computer Expertise. Computer expertise was the second most important predictor of frequent Internet use by teachers and their students. Teachers were asked to assess their own computer skills in a number of areas. Those with high computer skills in such areas as file handling, setting up database files, and using presentation and multimedia authoring software, were twice as likely to use the Internet for their own professional purposes and with students as those with relatively limited computer skills.
Pedagogical Beliefs and Practices. Teacher pedagogy (a topic discussed in detail later) was the third most important factor in determining Internet use with students. Teachers who believe strongly that good teaching involves facilitating independent student work rather than emphasizing direct instruction and skills practice, and who put those beliefs into practice, along with an emphasis on complex thinking, were much more likely to have their students use the Internet than were those who put relatively limited value on such approaches to teaching. In addition, these teachers, whom we label “constructivist,” were twice as likely to believe the Internet in the classroom to be essential to their teaching as those who were least constructivist. Similarly, for teacher Internet use, the most constructivist teachers (19% of all teachers) were two-and-one-half times as likely as the most traditional teachers (the 22% closest to the “traditional” end of the scale) to use the Internet for their own professional use.
Other Determinants of Internet Use. Other conditions that predict greater Internet use include participation in staff development on Internet use, a high frequency of informal contacts with other teachers at their school, engaging in a substantial range of professional leadership activities in the previous three years, being relatively young, having home Internet access, having made more personal investments in their own education, and finally, having had a few years of teaching experience (at least four years).
Not surprisingly, formal
staff development about the Internet is associated with greater use of the
Internet. Three out of ten teachers
report having attended a formal workshop teaching how to use the Internet or
other on-line activities, and those teachers were twice as likely to have
students use the Internet than other teachers.
However, it was also the case
that, completely apart from formal training, teachers who reported a high level
of informal contacts with other teachers at their school—e.g., frequently
observing other teachers' classes or having casual conversation about ideas for
student projects or issues in their subject-matter field—were also more likely
to use the Internet than teachers with fewer of these informal contacts. When more closely examined, this difference
between high informal contact teachers and others was at least as substantial
and even more widespread than the differences between those who attended formal
staff development about using the Internet and those who did not.
These
results are consistent with our findings on school culture discussed later in
this report. In strongly professional
school cultures, where teachers support one another, the effect of formal staff
development programs becomes magnified, as teachers help one another in taking
advantage of opportunities they had begun to learn about.
Finally, age and years of teaching experience, compared to other predictors, have relatively small relationships with Internet use. To a small extent, teachers in their first few years of teaching (at least those under age 30) are more likely to use the Internet in preparing lessons than more experienced and older teachers. They are also the teachers who consider the Internet to be essential in their classroom. However, those in their first three years of teaching are less likely to use the Internet with their students, perhaps due to the need to first master the routines of teaching before initiating innovative practices. In terms of actually using the Internet for student projects, teachers with four to seven years of experience were most likely to do so.
PART 2: TEACHING BELIEFS & PRACTICES
In our discussion of teachers’ use of the Internet, we suggested that how a teacher uses computers might better be understood by knowing about that teacher’s basic pedagogical beliefs and practices—what constitutes good teaching practice for themselves and how they go about organizing learning in their classroom. Traditionally, teaching practice is characterized by an emphasis on skill and knowledge transmission from teacher to students. This usually involves
·
the use of an
externally prescribed curriculum of discrete skills and factual knowledge;
·
direct
presentation and explanation to students of that procedural and factual
knowledge;
·
frequent
assignment of written exercises to students aimed at their remembering factual
knowledge and accurately performing skills; and then
·
evaluation
of students’ mastery of skills and knowledge by giving them recall and recognition written tests.
One contrast to a skill and knowledge transmission-oriented practice points to two emphases which it largely excludes:
· helping students to develop a deep understanding of a concept or topic, in all its complexity, rather than covering a specific and rather comprehensive curriculum; and
· designing instructional tasks specifically to make each one meaningful to each student—for example, connected to their own personal experience—rather than arbitrary from the student’s world view.
Both of those emphases are
associated with current efforts to improve teachers’ effectiveness, and both,
particularly the emphasis on meaningful instructional tasks, are associated
with discussions of pedagogy based on a theory of learning called
“constructivism.”
Complex Thinking: The first emphasis, on
teaching for understanding rather than its specific factual or skill
components, has students working on some of the more challenging tasks within
the teachers’ repertoire—tasks such as articulating reasoning (not just
answering questions), revising their work after feedback from teacher or peers,
engaging in serious discussion with their fellow students, and doing
meta-cognitive assessments of their own understanding and learning strategies.
Although it is not always easy to design tasks that engage
students in that kind of critical thinking, it may be more feasible to do so
when students have a rich array of information to work with (rather than only
pre-selected, quality-filtered textbook content), when communications
structures enable students to pose relevant questions to appropriate
individuals (both within the class and outside), and when technology-based
tools such as databases, analytic software, and composition software help them
to extract understanding from information. These activities may sometimes best
be accomplished by giving students greater responsibility to define problems
and organize their own investigations, and would clearly be better accomplished
when teachers become more expert at facilitating this type of independent
inquiry.
Meaningful Tasks: The second emphasis of
instructional reform extends from the first, making meaningfulness a primary
attribute of student tasks. This is
accomplished by assigning contextually rich learning tasks such as projects
that integrate the use of many different skills and have a real purpose beyond
the students’ learning the facts and skills themselves. In this model,
meaningfulness is presumed to arise from the “genuineness” of the problems
addressed, the inherent interest of such real problems to students, and a
structure that gives students more freedom in the nature of the problem studied
and the methods of problem-solving.
Constructivist learning theory suggests that tasks that are
more meaningful to those engaged in them result in learning that is more likely
to be carried over to different concrete situations than when taught without
context and without the learner’s “ownership.” As with the emphasis on critical
thinking, the emphasis on making tasks meaningful also involves more
collaborative work among students, and requires teachers to act as facilitators
of student inquiry instead of performing their traditional responsibilities for
providing direct instruction.
Before discussing what we found concerning the relationship
between teachers’ use of computer technologies and their basic pedagogical
beliefs and practices, we thought it useful to describe what our survey found
the distribution of those beliefs and practices to be among U.S. teachers.
Constructivist versus Traditional Beliefs and Practices of U.S. Teachers
Teaching Philosophies
A majority of U.S. teachers claim to adhere to philosophies
consistent with a constructivist view of learning, though wide disagreements do
prevail. For example, when presented
with pairs of contrasting alternatives about the most appropriate stance to
take as a teacher, 40% favored acting as a facilitator of independent student
inquiry while 30% said that it was more important for teachers to “explain,
show students how to do the work, and to assign specific practice.” (The rest,
30%, found themselves unable to state a preference between these two choices.)
About one-half of all teachers (48%) believe that having a
variety of activities going on in the classroom is preferable to having the
whole class do the same assignment, “one with…clear directions, and…that can be
done in short intervals that match students’ attention spans and the daily
class schedule.” Still the latter choice was favored by about one-fourth (26%)
of the teachers.
When teachers were given more concrete portraits of how two
teachers approached class discussions, twice as many (57%) believed that
students learned more useful skills
when faced with a constructivist teacher who brought out substantive questions
from students and led them to investigate their own questions than when
students were taught by a traditional teacher who used a rapid pace of simple,
straightforward questions to students that were based on their recent reading
assignment (29%). However, asked which teaching method provided students with
more knowledge, opinions were much
more evenly divided—44% believed the
traditional approach was better and 42% believed the constructivist approach
was.
In short, for most of our survey questions, teachers were
more likely to say they believed in a reform-oriented pedagogy. However, we
found, not surprisingly, that teachers found the constructivist pedagogy more
difficult to accomplish in practice.
Teaching Practices
The survey asked teachers a variety of questions about the frequency that they employed different teaching approaches. For example, at least weekly, about half of all teachers (52%) have students do “hands-on or laboratory” activities. However, about the same percentage report use of students doing individual seatwork at least weekly. About 44% of teachers have students work in small groups to come up with joint solutions, but only 8% have students “suggest or help plan classroom activities or topics” on a weekly basis. More than one-fourth (28%) have students write in a journal at least weekly, but slightly fewer (22%) have students write an essay explaining their thoughts that often.
When comparing the overall amount of time spent on activities associated with a constructivist approach to teaching (e.g., hands-on work, group work, and reflective writing) with the amount of time students spend on more traditional activities (e.g., individual seat work), our results suggest that on average, about an equal amount of time is spent on traditional and constructivist activities despite the prevalence of contructivist philosophy among U.S. teachers.
Teachers' responses to one very concrete question (summarized here in a general sense) suggest a reason: Most teachers (64%) report themselves to be more comfortable teaching in a traditional style than a constructivist one (28%), and more believe that even students prefer that type of instruction (53% to 37%) even though they believe that constructivist teaching is better for students in helping them gain useful skills.
Another reason for teachers’ greater conservatism in practice than in philosophy comes from the pressures teachers felt to be under. When teachers feel a large amount of pressure to organize their teaching in a way that is inconsistent with their personal judgement, their own voice concerning what defines good teaching is undervalued. Teachers feel more pressure around the issue of assessment than around any other issue measured.
A majority of teachers (58%) felt either “some” or “a lot” of pressure to prepare students for standardized tests, and 48% felt a similar pressure around performance-based assessment.
The other area in which many teachers feel external pressure to act against their better judgement concerns the curriculum. Just over half of the teachers find there is too much external pressure to cover a large number of curriculum topics. Half of the teachers are also concerned over having to cover specific curriculum topics. Nearly two-fifths of teachers (39%) also signal this pressure by indicating that the grade level expectations of next year's teacher serves to constrain what they teach. Also consistent with these results is the response to the required use of specific textbooks. More than one-third of the teachers (35%) expressed a concern over the use of specified textbooks.
In contrast to pressures regarding the curriculum and assessment, teachers feel relatively unimpaired in terms of how they choose to instruct their class. For example, only about one-fifth of teachers felt pressure to use computers or the Internet. Comparable percentages were recorded for other aspects of classroom instruction.
Teacher Practices by Subject Taught
Frequently Assigned Activities
Teachers of different subjects responded very differently when asked about how often they have students take part in various activities that are associated with a constructivist model of teaching versus those associated with emphasizing skill and knowledge transmission.
In general, English and elementary teachers reported the most constructivist-compatible practices. Foreign language teachers, math teachers, and business education teachers, in contrast, practice in a way more resembling skill and knowledge transmission. However, in all subjects teachers report specific practices that can be viewed as being consistent with constructivist reforms.
Traditional Practices
In this section, we discuss four items that can be viewed as being “traditional” in pedagogy:
· Students working individually answering questions from textbooks or worksheets
· Teachers leading whole-class discussions
· Teachers asking questions to see if students know the correct answer
· Using introductory drills to start a new unit
The most common student activity reported by U.S. teachers is a very traditional one—students working individually on problems from a textbook or worksheet. Math teachers have students do this the most often, with 79% reporting such activity at least weekly, 15 percentage points higher than any other group of teachers. Math teachers also reported spending more time leading whole-class discussions than any other subject teachers, again by a wide margin. Of the teachers of major academic subjects, English teachers were least likely to spend time in whole-class discussion. Business education teachers spend less time having students lead class discussions than in any other subject. Only 3% of business education teachers spend more than an hour per week with students taking class leadership roles, compared to 38% of English teachers.
Our survey respondents were given several reasons for asking students questions (e.g., “to elicit student ideas”; “to relate what they are working on to their own experiences”). Another reason was simply to “see if students know the correct answer.” Most teachers give that reason sometimes and those that did so most often were foreign language teachers (81% said “always” or “very often”), business education teachers (69%), and math teachers (62%). In contrast, only a minority of science teachers, English teachers, and vocational education teachers gave that response.
Finally, teachers were asked about several approaches they took when starting a new unit, such as having the students discuss the topic in groups or making conjectures about what they will learn or discover during the unit. In contrast to those “constructivist” choices, a large percentage of certain groups of teachers said that in their current unit, they had started it out with students practicing introductory drills. The teachers who used this approach the most were business education teachers (78%) and foreign language, fine arts, and computer teachers (roughly 60%). In contrast, fewer than 40% of English teachers and (elementary) teachers of self-contained classes reported using skill or fact drills to introduce their current unit. Not surprisingly, the teachers who used introductory drills the least were the ones most likely to introduce new units by having students make conjectures or discuss the new topics in small groups.
Constructivist Practices
We now turn our attention to teaching practices we have categorized as “constructivist.” Table 3 shows some of these practices that were part of one survey question about the frequency that teachers had students engage in different activities. Of the constructivist activities in that survey question, the most frequently reported were hands-on or laboratory work, group work, journal writing, and essay writing.
Overall, almost as many teachers have students do hands-on or laboratory activities on a weekly basis as have students engage in seatwork (answering textbook or worksheet questions).
Table 3: Percent of Teachers assigning Various
Activities Weekly or More Often
|
|
Answer questions from textbook or worksheet |
Hands-on or laboratory activities |
Work in small groups |
Journal writing |
Re-flec-tive essay writing |
Long projects |
Problems with no obvious method of solution |
Students plan activities |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Math |
79% |
24% |
52% |
8% |
10% |
2% |
20% |
4% |
|
Foreign Language |
73% |
27% |
40% |
12% |
5% |
9% |
1% |
3% |
|
Self-Contained
(elementary) |
68% |
64% |
59% |
58% |
35% |
21% |
21% |
17% |
|
Business Ed. |
55% |
78% |
27% |
4% |
1% |
26% |
1% |
3% |
|
Science |
47% |
67% |
42% |
15% |
16% |
10% |
18% |
4% |
|
Social Studies |
43% |
33% |
34% |
15% |
23% |
7% |
12% |
6% |
|
English |
39% |
36% |
37% |
44% |
36% |
20% |
18% |
9% |
|
Computers |
25% |
90% |
30% |
12% |
10% |
43% |
16% |
1% |
|
Vocational |
24% |
88% |
49% |
19% |
10% |
50% |
24% |
12% |
|
Fine Arts |
14% |
84% |
24% |
6% |
3% |
78% |
18% |
8% |
|
All teachers (incl.
‘other’) |
53% |
51% |
44% |
28% |
22% |
19% |
17% |
8% |
Source: Teaching, Learning and Computing –
1998.
http://www.crito.uci.edu/TLC.
|
|
However, hands-on activity is concentrated in certain subjects—computer classes, business education, vocational subjects, science classes, and elementary self-contained classes. Only a minority of math, foreign language, English, and social studies teachers have students do “hands-on” activities as often as once per week. Thus, except for science classes, where laboratory work has a long tradition, in the secondary grades, active manipulation of “stuff” is confined to non-academic subjects.
On the other hand, student small group
work is a reasonably common practice in most subjects, including subjects like
math and foreign language where other measures of pedagogy suggest a more
traditional practice. Still, only among
elementary teachers and secondary math teachers do a majority of teachers
assign group work on a weekly basis.
Most teachers do not involve students in long-term projects lasting at least a week
on a regular basis. Only 20% of all teachers said that students worked on long
projects during most weeks. Long projects were most common in fine arts (78%
reported that students did this during most weeks), vocational education
classes (50%), and computer classes (43%).
In contrast, in each of the academic subjects, no more than 10% of the
teachers said that project work occurred during most weeks. Only 2% of math teachers and 7% of social studies
teachers reported that level of project work by students.
Elementary and English teachers are the ones who most often engage students in writing journals or writing reflective essays. Well over half (58%) of elementary self-contained teachers have students write in journals at least weekly. Interestingly, although the word “problem-solving” is associated with mathematics, English teachers are as likely as math teachers to say that roughly once per week they had students work on “problems with no obvious solution” (18% vs. 20%). In sharp contrast, almost no business education teachers have students keep journals (only 4% do), write reflective essays (1%), or solve ambiguous problems (1%). Other teachers who make limited use of reflective writing assignments are math, fine arts, foreign language and computer teachers.
Finally, student participation in planning classroom activities or topics is not a common practice among teachers. Those who do so more frequently are teachers of elementary self-contained classes (17% weekly). Except for vocational education teachers, where 12% follow this practice, fewer than 10% of all other teachers do this weekly or more often.
In another survey question, we identified specific constructivist-compatible practices that commonly occur in certain subjects but not in others. For example, social studies and English teachers are more likely than other teachers to have students work on “problems with complex truths or with no clear right or wrong answer.” These two groups also more frequently report having students debate issues or make cases for different points of view. Interestingly, dealing with complex truths and debating issues are the among the only ones where elementary teachers do not seem particularly constructivist, suggesting that teachers perceive that only the older students have the intellectual skills required to handle that level of complexity.
Math teachers, although low on most measures of constructivist practice, demonstrate a willingness to have students at least occasionally solve problems that have only limited procedural direction. About half of the math teachers (47%) said that at least monthly they had students decide on their own procedures for solving problems and then have group discussions of the alternative solutions proposed. Math and science teachers also had students design their own problems to solve more often than, for example, social studies teachers did. However, student design of problems is most commonly found in vocational education classes and in “other secondary subjects” (which are primarily subjects of student initiative such as “exploratory,” “life skills,” and “community service”).
Two other practices are also found most frequently in non-academic courses: having students make a product to be used by others and demonstrating their work to an outside audience. These central components of constructivist-compatible teaching are found most often in vocational education classes (50% reporting making products for use monthly; 25%, outside demonstrations), computer classes (34% and 14%, respectively), and fine arts classes (26% and 33%). Among the academic subjects, only among English teachers are these activities reported to occur monthly by more than 10% of academic subjects teachers, and only 12 to 15 percent of English teachers engage students in those ways.
In contrast, it was in academic subjects where teachers most often reported using “multiple representations” of a concept or idea as a pedagogical approach. Multiple representations was an approach used “monthly” or more by about one-half of the teachers of all four major academic subjects (plus elementary teachers), proportionally twice as many teachers as in any of the non-academic subjects, or, interestingly, by foreign language teachers as well.
Changes in Practice over Last Three Years
Besides describing their current teaching practice, teachers
were asked to tell us in what ways their practice had changed over the
preceding three years. Sixteen
different aspects of instruction were included in this part of the survey,
including changes in a constructivist direction and changes in a more
traditional direction. Teachers were much more likely to report
constructivist-oriented changes than an increase in skill- or knowledge-transmission
practices. Changes reported by a majority of teachers included:
·
increasingly
having students teach or help one another,
·
having
students work in groups,
·
having
them review and revise their own work,
·
evaluating
students based on their products instead of by tests,
·
having
students explore a topic on their own without close direction, and
·
having
multiple activities occur simultaneously in their classroom.
In contrast, none of the practices of a traditional sort (e.g.,
using the textbook as a primary guide through units; or planning lessons using
principles of direct instruction) were reported to be used now more than three
years ago by a majority of teachers, although one-third of teachers said they
now more often closely supervise student work.
There were some interesting differences by subject in some
of the changes that were reported. An
increase in the use of student group work was reported more often by
mathematics teachers and business education teachers than in any other
subject. In the case of mathematics,
this may be due to the influence of the NCTM-led reform movement which may have
influenced teachers in how they organize their class even other NCTM goals are
not yet widely adopted. In the case of
business education, this could be due to an increased use of student work with
computers, which often involves students working in pairs or groups for both
practical (too few computers) and pedagogical (sharing of expertise) reasons.
Vocational education teachers, another group of heavy
computer-assigning teachers, but who were already above-average in using
student group work, reported a greater increase in having students teach or help each other than other subject-matter
teachers did. Also, and probably even more likely a result of computer use,
teachers of both computer classes and vocational education classes were the
most likely to say that they increasingly had many different activities going on at once in their classes than
they used to have. Because of the diversity of activities possible with
computers, computer work lends itself to a more heterogeneous classroom
environment.
On the other hand, computer teachers were among the least likely to report increased use of
student group work, perhaps because
they have enough computers available to their classes and because they tend to
focus on individual mastery of computer skills.
While many teachers are moving towards evaluating students
through their products rather than solely through tests, this characteristic
was found more often among elementary teachers and business education teachers
than among others. In the former case, this might be due to the growing support
for portfolios and performance testing in district and state policy. Such policies tend to impact practice faster
in elementary schools than among subject-specialized secondary practitioners.
In the case of business education teachers, an increase in performance testing
over written tests could conceivably be due to their increased use of
computer-based projects.
Foreign language teachers reported an interesting pattern of
recent changes in pedagogical practices.
They were more likely than any other group of teachers to say that they
increasingly allowed themselves to be taught by students and that they allowed
students to explore a topic on their own without direction. However, they were the least likely to
report increases in student inquiry activities (“make predictions and
investigate them”), in long projects, or in letting student interest partly
influence the topics in the lessons.
This suggests an instructional “letting-go,” but a rather stable view
regarding curriculum priorities.
Fine arts teachers, as a group, seemed to be relatively
little changed in practice over the past few years. On almost every measure,
they were one of the least likely to report changes, particularly in terms of
constructivist practices (where in some ways they were already at the “top”),
or in the use of more traditional direct instruction. It might be significant
that fine arts classes are among the least frequent users of computers,
particularly outside of specialty multi-media courses.
Compared to the groups of teachers we have been discussing,
teachers of other academic subjects (English, science, and social studies)
tended not to be distinct as groups, but to vary among themselves in how much
they had changed over the past few years.
(English teachers, though, do report an increased use of long projects
in their classes; and social studies teachers tended to report somewhat less
movement towards more student inquiry work than in other fields.) In these subjects, variations among teachers
in the conditions of teaching may be different enough between schools that no
particular pattern is emerging for teachers of these academic subjects as a
whole.
In summary, in terms of both their current array of teaching practices and the changes they report making over the past three years, teachers of different subjects display very correspondingly different patterns of pedagogy. The specific ways that they engage students in meaningful tasks around cognitively complex issues varies substantially subject-by-subject. Still, as we just suggested for teachers of English, science, and social studies with respect to changes in practice, even among teachers of the same subject there are substantial differences in pedagogical style. We now turn to our analysis of factors related to different pedagogical styles, moving towards examining our central research question—the relationship of teachers’ pedagogical style to how they use computers.
Correlates of Constructivist Practices
When asked “why” they changed towards constructivist
practice, teachers (that is, the ones who changed most in that direction)
selected a variety of reasons, but most commonly they attributed the changes in
their practice to (a) changes in the main goals they had for students; (b)
changes in their understanding about how people learn or understand things; (c)
staff development experiences they had; and (d) their experiences with
computers.
In Part 3 of this Report, we will look at the relationship
of computer use to pedagogy. Here we
will discuss some of our findings about other factors that seem to be related
to the use of constructivist practices, besides computer experiences and
besides the teacher’s particular subject-matter responsibilities, which we have
already examined.
School Experiences – Staff Development and Informal Contacts
Both formal and informal experiences in school appear to affect
the ability of teachers to engage in constructivist practices. Teachers who
report having attended, during the past year, a greater number of staff
development sessions focused on constructivist pedagogy were more
constructivist in practice. We also
found that constructivist teachers had more frequent informal contacts with
other teachers at their school—that is, they had more discussions about
teaching methods, subject content, and technology, and they observed
instruction by other teachers or experienced their own classes observed. Does
participation in such activities actually cause someone to become more
constructivist in practice? One might
argue that constructivist-oriented teachers may already have been more likely
to participate in staff development focused on teaching practice and interact
with other teachers in their building around teaching issues in the first
place. However our analysis still
suggests that these types of experiences actually have an impact on teachers’
practice even so.
Our reasoning is based on the following: we make a
distinction between teaching philosophy (what teachers say is good pedagogy)
and teaching practice (what they tell us they actually do in their classes),
knowing, of course, that they are related.
Furthermore, we assume that philosophy is less apt to change in response
to circumstances than is practice—in other words, that experiences influence
how one organizes instruction, but only more slowly influence basic beliefs. Our analytic method “holds constant”
philosophy (compares teachers with similar levels of constructivist beliefs)
and looks at the correlates of practice among teachers with the same
philosophical bent.
Doing that, we find that the relationship between
constructivist practice and attendance at staff development workshops even
about teaching practices remains positive, controlling on philosophy.
The same is true about frequency of informal contacts. In other words, taking teachers with roughly
the same teaching philosophies, those who spend more time talking about
teaching issues with other teachers (and who observe one another’s classes) are
more constructivist in practice. Those
with fewer contacts (discussions and classroom observations) are less
constructivist.
Leadership
Discussing teaching issues with
other teachers at one’s school and observing each other teach brings teaching
out from a private practice into a more public sphere. Going beyond same-school contacts, teachers
who interact with teachers from other schools, through attending conferences,
participating on committees, or even informally exchanging e-mails, are moving
in the direction of making their practice a professional one. Full professional leadership goes even
beyond that, involving mentoring of another teacher, teaching peers in
workshops, teaching a college class for other teachers, or publishing articles
for fellow practitioners. Only a
minority of teachers engage in these leadership activities—for example, over
the previous three years, about
one-fourth (24%) of all teachers formally mentored another
teacher, 30% taught peers in workshops, 12% taught a college class, and only 5%
published an article on education—but these activities are very significant.
The
more that teachers extend their activities beyond their own classroom towards
having a leadership orientation, the more constructivist their teaching
practice. Again, it may be that teachers with more constructivist practices are
the ones who choose to engage in more professional behaviors. But it also may
be that the professional interactions themselves influence teachers’
pedagogies. One theory is that the teacher’s professional interactions come to
serve as a model for their own classroom practice. That is, teachers who learn
from their peers and present their ideas and opinions to their peers are more
likely to see that this is a type of learning and activity that their students can profit from as well.
School Professional Culture and Teacher Pedagogy
What if a whole school takes on a professional orientation?
Does this impact teachers’ pedagogies as well?
We have begun this examination of school culture by first defining a
professionally oriented school culture as one where there exists:
·
Shared
school goals: common goals and priorities among the teachers and administrators
at the school and where discussion of goals is public and frequent
·
A
community of learners among teachers, where teachers feel they are always
learning how to teach, where they encourage innovation with each other, discuss
ideas together, and share samples of student work
·
An
integrated teacher-respecting staff development program—a program where
teachers help plan staff development activities, where the various activities
are related to one another, and where teachers are provided with support for
implementing the ideas discussed
·
An
environment in which teachers are both recognized for success and given
constructive criticism by their own peers
We found that in the schools where the
school culture is most professionally oriented—we focused on the 5% of all
schools where this culture seemed most evident—teachers’ instructional practice
is more constructivist than one would predict simply by knowing their own
personal orientation towards their job. That is, whether teachers are more
classroom-focused or involved heavily in collaborative and leadership
activities beyond the classroom, they exhibit higher levels of constructivist
pedagogy in schools with substantial professionally oriented teacher cultures.
Such school cultures may aid teachers in orienting their professional
activities beyond the boundaries of the classroom, which in turn, as we have
seen, may move them towards a more constructivist practice.
PART 3: TECHNOLOGY AS A
TOOL FOR REFORM
We now turn our attention to the relationship between computer use and the types of teaching practices we have been discussing.
Many people believe that technology can be a critical component of a constructivist-compatible teaching practice. This is because technology provides students with almost unlimited access to information with which to test ideas against facts, it can facilitate communication and interaction with people whose knowledge and opinions are relevant to student inquiry, and it provides students with tools to help them both articulate ideas and to c