Summary of Milken Exchange Paper
written by Kathleen Fulton
The computer is no longer "the new kid in school".
Since the early 1980s, when computers were first used in schools, many billions of dollars have been spent on hardware, software, teacher training, and connections. But we may be tempted to ask: are our students technologically literate or, as many have begun to demand, are they technologically fluent?
These are important questions for America's success - and that of its children - in the information age. But we need a consensus on what it means for students to be facile with technology. Is there a set of "necessary skills" that define technological fluency? Can this set be expanded to include the broader communication and information skills students will need in the global economy of the 21st century?
In considering this issue, we must recognize that the effective use of technology to develop learning, communication, and information skills is the result of many factors, chief of which are the teacher, her/his competence and ability to shape technology-based learning activities to meet students' learning needs.
Other factors - software, access, school support in allowing time and experimentation to try new things - all have a place in the impact which technology can have on students and their achievement, as has been noted in many past analyses.
But there is another key element, one that may seem obvious but which in fact has been overlooked in many past studies of computer-based learning in the classroom. One recent study put it succinctly: "The effect of computer-based learning technologies in facilitating student learning and performance is seen only when participants have the knowledge and skill to use the technology."1 (please refer to the link at the foot of this
page for all citations)
While this may seem self-evident, the authors report that it was perhaps because of the "assumed power of the technology"1 that past researchers have not evaluated the knowledge and skill base necessary for students to use technology most effectively.
Changing Definitions
What do students need to know and do with technology? Unlike the more stable content and goals we have for other areas of school study, technology continues to change and evolve; with these changes come ever new goals for how technology should serve learning, and what students should know about technology. A review of the "prevailing wisdom" about appropriate technology use since the early 1980s takes one down an ever turning road that includes programming in BASIC; then with LOGO; and on to drill and practice applications on integrated systems; word processing and curriculum specific tools like history databases, simulations, microcomputer-based labs; then multimedia; the Internet; and now Web page design.
While there may be some logic to this progression, the reality is that, just as educators get their arms around one approach, with the attendant investments in software, training and possible curricular readjustments, the messages about appropriate technology use change.
Past National and International Assessments of Computer Competence
These changing expectations have been reflected in past large scale assessments of "computer competence," such as the 1985-86 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) national assessment of computer competence.
This national sampling of third-, seventh- and eleventh-grade students assessed their knowledge and skills in using a computer, using questions dealing with facts and procedures related to computer use.
Measures of computer literacy, not unlike those in the first NAEP study, were targeted in the Computers in Education Study undertaken by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).2
The 1992 study tested and analyzed basic computer knowledge and skills in 12 countries, with test items developed and reviewed by an international team, and translated into several languages. The curriculum analyses that were made from a 1989 study revealed little consensus either within countries or across countries regarding computer goals, making it a challenge to design an assessment instrument. The instrument that was developed, called the Functional Information Technology Test, tested what students needed to function effectively with information-related tasks, with test items built around concepts, computer handling, and applications.
Factors Influencing Today's Definition of Necessary Skills
While past national and international assessments are important in helping to understand how far we have come as a nation in student technological understandings and skills, it is useful to bring our focus to the present, and consider the factors that influence today's definitions of necessary skills for technological fluency.
These include the demands driven by expanding information and communication resources, business influences, national leadership, and the curriculum standards movement. Taken together, they suggest today's definition of technological literacy as a combination of what separately have been called information skills and literacy, communications skills and literacy, and technology skills necessary to function in a technological environment.
Today's definitions of technological fluency evolve from the intersection created by the technology pull - that is, advances in what the technology can do, and how it is used in the world beyond the classroom - as well as the pedagogical push - changing views of learning reflected in the educational standards and assessments that drive instruction.
Information Literacy in the Age of the Internet
Concern about information literacy predates the computer age. In language arts, there has long been an emphasis on teaching students to develop skills they need in order to analyze the written word and the messages found therein. With the growing influence of television in our daily lives, many have called for media literacy that gives students tools to interpret, critique, and evaluate what they see on television and in movies and videos. However, today's rapid growth of the Internet and the access it provides to large amounts of information has ignited a firestorm of concern regarding the need for increased attention to information literacy.
Unlike the information students receive from earlier forms of media--textbooks, television, documentaries, library materials--all of which have been carefully researched, documented, and selected for publication and presentation, especially when used in educational settings--what comes across on the Internet is "undigested" information, provided by expert and novice alike, scholars and shysters, pedagogues and pedophiles.
The days when teachers and parents were able to control and orchestrate all the information presented to students are past. The technology pull of the Internet will force the issue of developing broader information literacy skills for all students if we expect them to sort the wheat from the chaff,
the true from the untrue, the rumor from the real. In order to work, learn, and flourish in what has been called the "Infosphere"3
students will need to become skilled in
- Finding information from a variety of sources
- Evaluating information
- Making critical judgments about its value, reliability, and validity
- Creating and distributing information and knowledge via the many communication forms--text, video, graphics, conversation--that come together in today's technology-mediated communications formats
Business Demands
The business community has been an important voice calling for students to develop technological literacy. As early as 1991, in the Department of Labor report What Work Requires of Students,5 the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), identified skills and attributes necessary for employment in the workplace:
- Resource allocation skills--handling time, money, materials, space, and staff
- Interpersonal skills--working on teams, teaching others, serving customers, leading, negotiating, and working well with people from culturally diverse backgrounds
- Information skills--acquiring and evaluating data, organizing and maintaining files, interpreting and communicating, and using computers to process information
- Systems skills--understanding social, organizational, and technological systems, monitoring and correcting performance, and designing or improving systems
- Technology skills--selecting equipment and tools, applying technology to specific tasks, and maintaining and troubleshooting technologies
These skills are required in the expanding global economy in which American business must operate.
Success in this global economy requires high performance industries--those that can create new products or services that are of high quality or those that add value to existing goods and services. In turn, these high performance industries will be built around a workforce composed of individuals who are flexible learners, able to change, adapt, and move with the opportunities technology and innovation offer. Management at all levels will require a cadre of "symbolic analysts," individuals who are competent in working with abstractions, facile with systems thinking, comfortable with experimentation, and can work collaboratively to solve problems.
New Views of Learning
The factory-like organization of schools of the industrial age were structured to support a transmission model of education in which teaching was telling, and learning was memorizing.
New views of cognition support6 a constructivist view that suggests "advanced skills of comprehension, reasoning, composition, and experimentation are acquired not through the transmission of facts but through the learner's interaction with content."7
This approach takes advantage of a student's natural ability to learn through experience and to "create mental structures...which organize and synthesize the information and experiences which the individual encounters in the world."8
Information and communication technologies like the Internet support this approach to teaching and learning, which encourages learning in authentic contexts, collaboration and external supports, and use of multiple primary source materials and resources as well as textbooks.
Federal Leadership and National Standards
Federal leadership, from the identification of computer literacy as a fourth basic skill in A Nation at Risk in 1983 to the current emphasis on educational technology in the Clinton Administration, has brought important attention and resources to the picture.9
Because the United States, unlike many other countries, does not have a national curriculum, there is an emerging consensus on what students should learn, building on the national curriculum standards developed over the last several years by a range of professional associations. These standards have had a major impact on performance standards developed at the state and district level. Curriculum standards and benchmarks have been developed, or are in the process of being drafted, in the areas of mathematics, science, history, language arts, geography, the arts, civics, economics, foreign languages, health, physical education, and social studies.10 They have provided signposts that direct today's state and local standards movement.
State and District Technology Skill Standards and Assessments
Nevertheless, policymakers at the state and district levels continue to struggle with a central dilemma. Should they define and measure learning goals for technology, or what can be called first-level technology skills (e.g., learning about technology) or should they instead define and measure the second-level goals for learning through technology (e.g., "thinking with computers")?
A survey of state technology directors by the Milken Family Foundation in September 1997 found that, of the forty-seven respondents, thirteen reported technology skills embedded in curricular standards, three had discrete technology standards, and seventeen reported both embedded and discrete standards.
Research
Much needs to be done to better understand how technology skills are best developed, assessed, and supported. There is little agreement on common data elements that could be collected across projects to give a clearer picture of outcomes. Schools and school systems are hungry for assistance in this area--data they should collect, activities they should observe and record, indexes that go beyond test scores, criteria that suggest when to make mid-course adjustments, best practices they can adopt, and models they can emulate. With the substantial investments in technology at all levels, greater funding and dissemination of research will assist educators and policymakers at all levels in implementing technology goals and applications.
Concluding Comments
If teaching with ever-changing technologies is like building an airplane while it is in flight, then defining and assessing what skills are needed to work and learn with technology is akin to developing a flight plan enroute. Nonetheless, the reality of today's technological environment means that educators must address the issue of technological fluency for all students. Perhaps what is most exciting and promising is that the demands of technology are forcing educators to have conversations about broad goals for teaching and learning in the twenty-first century. Through these conversations and the policies that evolve from them, America's children may indeed develop the skills and wisdom they will need to meet their dreams.
EXAMPLE 1: STATE LEVEL
North Carolina
provides an interesting example of curriculum standards that separate technology skills as discrete skills to be tested.
Illinois provides a contrasting model; here standards for technology are embedded in the benchmarks for the curriculum standards rather than as a separate set of competencies.
They are neither technology-specific nor grade-level-specific benchmarks, but are built around what is called
"six essential learnings in a technological society."1
The indicators call for assuring that all students are:
- Information seekers, navigators, and evaluators
- Critical thinkers, analyzers, and selectors of information and technologies appropriate to the task
- Creators of knowledge using information resources and technology
- Effective communicators using a variety of appropriate technologies/media
- Technical users
- Responsible citizens in a technological age
EXAMPLE 2: DISTRICT LEVEL
School districts, like states, vary in the approaches they take to technology skills standards and assessment. Two contrasting approaches are Jefferson County, Kentucky's delineation of technology-specific skills, and the technology-embedded curriculum adopted by the Cupertino Union School District in California.
Examples Of Technology Proficiencies Demonstrated in Promising Projects
What does it look like when students use technology in real contexts? In collaborative telecommunications-based science projects such as GLOBE, Kids as Global Scientists, or Global Lab, students conduct research in their home community and share the data with colleagues around the world. Thus, they develop competence with technological tools at the same time they develop research skills, content knowledge, and the ability to collaborate with peers and adults, both in the classroom and at a distance.
In New Jersey's Princeton High School, world history students created a virtual museum in which they selected, studied, and built Web pages for "clickable masterpieces" that support their studies. Their analyses integrate various topics (e.g., history, mythology, geography, religion, and cultural information) in the context of artistic approaches taken by the artists and the messages found in their works.
As they isolate small portions of the paintings for further discussion, the students research deeper into the various layers of meaning they find in the art works. When asked the value of supplementing their world history studies with this time-consuming technology activity, students report that, because they are presenting their work on the Internet, where it can be viewed by anyone around the world, they have to be clear, accurate, and thoughtful in their analyses and presentations. As one student put it, "Because I'm teaching it to someone else, I really have to understand it myself."1
In the Virtual Canyon project--supported by a two year National Science Foundation Networking in Education grant--students in elementary, middle, and high schools in the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District are collaborating with scientists from local universities and the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Research Institute (MBARI) to design and create field guides on the World Wide Web, based on undersea explorations deep into the wonders of the huge canyon beneath the Monterey Bay. Using dynamic video collected by MBARI's remotely controlled vehicle, the teams of students, teachers, and scientists are developing a learning system wherein content, technology, expertise, and knowledge meet in an ever-growing, user-oriented online environment. As the students conduct their research using these resources, and publish reports on the Web, they build expertise about the creatures and conditions they are studying, the scientific process itself, and how to use technology as a tool for communication and research.2
EXAMPLE 3: LINKS
Standards and the Internet
"Good teachers have standards in mind when they set their lessons up, where the idea of a "standard" represents a specific idea of what the teacher expects a student to recall, replicate, manipulate, understand, or demonstrate at some point down the road - and of how the teacher will know how close a student has come to meeting that standard. Standards, in other words, are conceptually nothing new - but they did receive a new emphasis over the last decade, through various state initiatives and through the passage of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act."
"The growth of the Internet has given us the chance to index the sources of information about standards in one place and place that information at anyone's electronic fingertips. We have established this page as a repository for as much information about educational standards and curriculum frameworks from all sources (national, state, local, and other) as can be found on the Internet."
An annotated list of Internet sites with K-12 educational standards and curriculum frameworks documents - brought to you by the Putnam Valley Schools, Putnam Valley, NY
