Findings

Teaching Philosophy

The types of software that teachers use and the objectives they have for using that software are affected, not only by the clientele whom the teachers serve, but by their deeper beliefs and understandings about teaching and learning. One emphasis in the TLC national survey involved an effort to measure teachers' underlying philosophy of teaching and to relate those teaching philosophies to their use of computers in instruction.

Teaching philosophy is a broad subject. In the TLC survey, we conceptualized the major dimension of interest to be the commonly-discussed contrast between a "transmission" view of learning and a "constructivist" one, and the valuation of alternative teaching practices in terms of their consistency with one of these theories of learning.

• Traditional Transmission Instruction is based on a theory of learning that suggests that students will learn facts, concepts, and understandings by absorbing the content of their teacher's explanations or by reading explanations from a text and answering related questions. Skills (procedural knowledge) are mastered through guided and repetitive practice of each skill in sequence, in a systematic and highly prescribed fashion, and done largely independent of complex applications in which those skills might play some role.
  
  
• Constructivist-Compatible Instruction is based on a theory of learning that suggests that understanding arises only through prolonged engagement of the learner in relating new ideas and explanations to the learner's own prior beliefs. A corollary of that assertion is that the capacity to employ procedural knowledge (skills) comes only from experience in working with concrete problems that provide experience in deciding how and when to call upon each of a diverse set of skills.

The “Ms. Hill vs. Mr. Jones” vignettes were used to gauge teachers' overall preference for, and beliefs about, contrasting direct instruction and constructivist instructional styles. (See Exhibit 14 for the vignettes used.) Although most teachers can see value and a reason to teach like either teacher, in different situations, a preference for Mr. Jones’ pedagogy suggests a clearer belief in the value of constructivist instructional reforms. Respondents were asked to evaluate the two alternative teaching styles with respect to four criteria: with which approach were they more comfortable, which approach did they think students preferred, from which approach did they think students gained more knowledge, and from which approach did they think students gained more useful skills.

Overall, more teachers felt comfortable with (64%) and thought students preferred (53%) the traditional style of Ms. Hill. Moving quickly over content may pose fewer problems for teachers and students and therefore seem easier. However, in terms of the consequences for students, teachers were more likely to believe that Mr. Jones’ approach was better. Concerning students gaining more knowledge from Hill or Jones, teachers were evenly split — with more than 40% favoring each approach. Concerning the acquisition of useful skills many more teachers favored Mr. Jones' approach (57% favoring Jones, 29% favoring Hill). This suggests that teachers think students will benefit from some use of inquiry-oriented teaching that places more responsibility on students. At the same time, they recognize that it is difficult to carry out many of those practices, particularly because not all students are eager to participate in classroom learning organized around those practices.

In the paired comparison question, five pairs of philosophical positions were presented, four of which we discuss here. One expressed the contrast in the role of the teacher between being a facilitator of student learning versus an explainer of material to students, very much encapsulating the difference in approach between Ms. Hill and Mr. Jones in the earlier question. (See Exhibit 15.) A second pair contrasted a teaching approach where multiple activities were going on in class at the same time, activities suggestive of complex project work and a fair amount of latitude for students, versus a classroom where everyone was working on 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." A third comparison was between prioritizing curriculum content coverage versus giving emphasis to "encouraging sense making" among students, and the fourth was whether promoting student interest or having them learn textbook content was more important.

Exploratory factor analysis suggested that, like the two survey questions just discussed, most of the items about teaching philosophy could be interpreted as indicators of a common underlying construct that contrasts constructivist versus transmission and skills-practice orientations. Reliability analysis of 13 of these items produced an index with an alpha of 0.83. The following are these 13 survey items, which are expressed in constructivist terms when both poles were presented to respondents, and marked as “reversed” when the prompt asked the respondent to “agree or disagree” with a transmission-oriented statement.

• Jones’ inquiry approach produces more student knowledge than Hill’s direct instruction
• Jones’ inquiry approach produces more student skills than Hill’s direct instruction
• Believes in being a facilitator rather than explainer
• Student interest and effort is more important than textbook content
• Sense-making and thinking are more important than the specific curriculum content
• Different students engaged in different project-type activities is better than the whole class working at the same time on a series of short-duration assignments
• Students will take more initiative if they are free to move around the room
• Students should help establish the criteria on which their work is assessed
• Instruction should be built problems with clear, correct answers (reversed)
• Teachers know more than students and shouldn’t let students muddle around (reversed)
• Student learning depends on background knowledge — that’s why teaching facts is so necessary (reversed)
• It is better for the teacher, not students, to decide what activities are to be done (reversed)
• A quiet classroom is generally needed for effective learning (reversed)

Teachers differed substantially by subject and by school level in their agreement with a constructivist teaching philosophy as manifested in this scale. (See Exhibit 17 for those differences measured as z-scores among the probability sample of teachers.) Of the four groups of secondary academic subject-matter teachers on whom this paper focuses, by far the most "constructivist" in philosophy are the high school English teachers, while the most transmission-oriented are middle school social studies teachers and high school mathematics teachers. However, within every group of subject-matter teachers, there are some who are more constructivist than others and those who are more transmission-oriented. It is those comparisons that are central to our next two issues: (1) Whether differential teaching philosophy accounts for differential computer use among teachers of the same subject and school level. And (2), whether teaching philosophy explains any of the differences in computer use practices by teachers of high- and low-ability classes or high- and low-SES school communities.

Overall, it is clear that teachers with the most constructivist teaching philosophies are stronger users of computers: They use computers more frequently, they use them in more challenging ways, they use them more themselves, and they have greater technical expertise. [Not all of these results are presented here.] Constructivist teachers are also much more likely to report having increased their use of computers over the past five years. As Exhibit 18 shows, the most constructivist quartile of teachers is particularly distinct in their increased use of computers with students. In terms of professional uses and exploring new software, they are also more likely than others say they are now doing so much more than five years ago, but their true distinctiveness is in terms of student use—both direct assignments and encouraging students to use computers in their work.

The next two exhibits examine in more detail the question of teaching philosophy and frequency of assigning student use. When teachers are grouped from the most transmission-oriented philosophies to the most constructivist ones, those in the most constructivist quartile among all teachers are twice as likely to have their students use computers on a weekly basis as those in the least constructivist (more transmission- and skill-oriented) teachers. Generally, this is even more true within subjects. The red line in Exhibit 19 shows that, of the middle school English teachers who placed into the most constructivist-believing quartile of all teachers (a little more than 1/3 of all middle school English teachers did), nearly one-half (48%) have their students use computers weekly. Only 31% of the "more typical" middle school English teachers in the middle two quartiles on philosophy do so, while for the most transmission-and-skill-oriented middle school English teachers (the bottom 16% of that group), only 10% have their students use computers on a weekly basis. For high school English and social studies teachers, it is primarily the most constructivist group who assign computer work to students — only half as many teachers in any of the other three philosophy quartiles appear to do so.

In mathematics and science, the pattern is somewhat different, as shown in Exhibit 20. Although, as with the case of the other academic subjects, teachers who have the most constructivist philosophies are more likely than other teachers in their subject to assign frequent computer work, there is also a "peak" among teachers who are "moderately traditional"—that is, quartile #3 measuring down from the most constructivist. In fact, among high school mathematics teachers (and math teachers as a whole), those who are moderately traditional use computers more than any other group. This suggests that in these subjects, although we did not find numerical dominance at both high-performing and low-performing settings the way we did for English and social studies, where frequent computer use does occur in math and science, it may still be of two types: activities such as gathering or analyzing information, writing about it, and then sharing it with others, activities assigned by constructivist teachers; or more skill- and fact-oriented work embodied in vocabulary and skill games assigned by teachers not so traditional as to avoid computers altogether, but traditional enough in terms of teaching objectives for drill-and-practice activities to dominate their use of technology.

It may be, then, that pedagogical differences among math and science teachers foster contrasting patterns of computer use, while high-frequency computer users in English and social studies vary not so much by teaching philosophy as by contrasting situations to which they put to use a constructivist philosophy of teaching—both while working with disadvantaged students and while working with advantaged and advanced students.

We can easily see the effects of mathematics teachers' philosophies of teaching on how they use computers in their classes. Our slice at the data looks only at the math teachers who used computers frequently with students—in particular, those who reported that a typical student in the particular class studied used computers more than 20 times during the year. The contrasting objectives for computer use by the more constructivist and the more skills-oriented computer-assigning math teachers are shown in Exhibit 21.

Strong majorities of the computer-using transmission-and-skill oriented teachers selected "mastering skills just taught" and "remediating skills not learned well" (80% and 63%, respectively) as their major objectives for student computer use. Among the constructivist math teachers, the primary objectives included "finding out about ideas and information (57%), improving computer skills (35%), presenting information to an audience (34%), learning to work cooperatively (31%), and expressing themselves in writing (20%)—all of these mentioned more often than either skills remediation or reinforcement (15% each).[10] Not surprisingly, the two different groups of computer-using math teachers used different types of software. However, the pattern was not what might be expected. Both skills-oriented and constructivist math teachers had their students use "games for practicing skills" on at least 10 occasions (38% and 29% respectively). It was the greater variety of software use that distinguished the more constructivist computer-using math teachers. They were much more likely to have students do word processing on at least 10 occasions (47% vs. 8%), to at least occasionally obtain information from CD-ROM reference materials (42% vs. 6%), to use the Web for the same purpose (48% vs. 28%), and to use graphics software (35% vs 9%), most likely for visualizing numerical relationships.

For science teachers who used computers a great deal in class, differences between the more transmission/skills-oriented one and the constructivist ones in how they used computers were somewhat more subtle. The biggest difference between them was in the constructivists' more often having students using computers to present work to the class—both in terms of their primary objectives for computer use (34% vs. 19%) and in actual use of presentation software (34% vs. 6% using presentation software at least occasionally). Constructivist computer-assigning science teachers were also more likely to have students use computers for information-gathering although, in principle, both groups valued computers for this reason almost equally, and, in fact, had students use the World Wide Web to a similar extent. Occasional use of student e-mail was another way the two groups differed (32% vs. 11%). So one must conclude that the differences in how these two groups of science teachers used computers were more subtle than could be observed with the broad brushstrokes of a survey.

[10] Both groups of computer-using math teachers named "analyzing information" relatively frequently (between 36% and 41%).