Technology's Effect on Capacities and Dispositions in Education Abstract | Life Long Learning | Inquiry | Critical Thinking | Community | Summary | References |
“Why does my tongue stick to the flagpole when it’s cold outside?” “Why do I get goose bumps when I am scared?” “Why is the sky blue… the grass green… the lake smelly…why…why…why…?” Anyone with children or anyone who has ever spent time with children knows that they have a fascination with understanding why. “Why?” is the basis of inquiry. Unfortunately, traditional educational methods based on memorization suck the curiosity out of students before they graduate. By the time most children get to high school their attention is focused on something more sinister (and boring). “What do I need to know to pass the test?” “How many questions can I miss and still get an A?” Occasionally, teachers get a refreshing glimpse of the past when something sparks a student’s interest enough to cause him or her to ask “why?” once again.
Recently, in the middle of a forensics lesson a student of mine tapped on the top of his can of soda before opening it up. “Why do you do that?” asked one of the other students. His reply was that it makes the soda not explode and fizz out all over him. This prompted another student to ask “Mrs. L-C is that really true?” Knowing that this would be occupying the thoughts of my students for the rest of the period, and realizing that this could be one of those excellent teaching moments that other teachers brag about at lunch, I decided to allow them to figure it out for themselves. What forensic concept was I teaching that day? I have absolutely no idea, but I do remember the outcome of the soda can experiment and I would be willing to bet my career that each of those students remember the outcome of THEIR experiment as well.
Most teachers feel that the most important aspect of any curriculum (whether it be social studies, math, or science) is not vocabulary or factual knowledge, but instead an understanding of the concepts and how research to discover those concepts in that particular discipline is conducted. As teachers, one of the dispositions we would like our students to have is an inquiring mind. We would, in addition, like our students to actually have the capacity to make use of this inquiring disposition. Since no student can live on inquiry alone, we would also like to see community, critical thinking, and life long learning become dispositions and capacities of our students. Inquiry is a form of critical thinking which students can use for solving everyday problems in their personal lives and in their communities for the rest of their lives. In this way, all four critical dispositions are intertwined. If the people in your neighborhood have a high occurrence of a certain cancer would you just assume it was normal and acceptable? Not if you had been taught the art of inquiry. You would systematically inquire about the environment around you so that the problem may be identified and fixed and you could get to sleep at night without worrying about your family.
Science is the discipline which lends itself to inquiry based learning the most. However, in other courses inquiry based teaching could be very helpful as well because inquiry is the way that we learn about the world everyday. What better way is there for a student to understand the Pythagorean Theorem than using it to calculate the height of the school flagpole, or anything else they want for that matter? I remember this lesson from junior high (which was 20 years ago) when I measured the flagpole shadow on the ground, figured the angle between the pole and the ground and calculated the height of the flagpole without actually physically measuring it. That inquiry will stay with me forever.
“Scientific inquiry refers to the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and propose explanations based on the evidence derived from their work. Inquiry also refers to the activities of students in which they develop knowledge and understanding of scientific ideas, as well as an understanding of how scientists study the natural world.” (Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards, p. 1) If you replace the words “science” and “scientists” with other disciplines this definition would also be appropriate for any other content area that is taught.
Inquiry is important in the science classroom because it allows students to model the behavior and methods of real scientists. A typical scientific inquiry might consist of the following steps: a scientist makes observations, these observations lead to questions, evidence is gathered to find answers to these questions, previous research is referenced to provide more evidence, based on evidence and research a possible explanation is proposed and published, other scientists review the publication, new evidence adds to the explanation and public policy is affected. (Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards, p. 1-4)
For many years science education has been handicapped by lack of access to authentic scientific evidence and a lack of funds sufficient to purchase the tools needed to conduct real scientific work in the classroom. The proliferation of affordable technology has affected science education in many positive ways. Now students have the tools necessary to answer their scientific questions.
Public education in America began in 1647 with a Massachusetts Law that mandated the hiring of a schoolmaster to teach children in towns of fifty families or more. Historically there have been a lot of great ideas in education but most of these have remained ideas. Regardless of the innovative idea, it seems that throughout its history, public education has changed very little.
In the 1700’s, Ben Franklin became very interested in education reform. As an inventor, Franklin understood the importance of inquiry in education. He proposed a curriculum that emphasized using workshops and laboratories to allow students a chance to learn through direct observations. Unfortunately, his vision of the future of education did not catch on in that century.
In the 1860’s, Herbert Spencer supported discovery learning as opposed to learning facts and figures. Spencer’s controversial ideas were often denounced because his vision of the perfect classroom lacked rigor. However, his belief that subjects should be taught in a hands on manner would be very popular by today’s standards and his hope that students would learn by discovering would be shared with advocates of Inquiry.
In 1892 the National Education Association appointed a group of experts to the Committee of Ten which sought to standardize the curricula in all subjects. The Committee of Ten recommended that 20-25% of the time a student spent in secondary education be focused on the sciences in the “pursuit of knowledge”. While placing science curricula so high on the list of important subjects was a step in the right direction, this mandate was a step back in the evolution of Inquiry in science education because it required teachers to teach science as a bank of knowledge that students should memorize.
In the early 1900’s John Dewey published his ideas in How We Think. Dewey compared the inquiring mind of a child to that of a scientist and “argued that thinking is an active process involving experimentation and problem solving” (Schugurensky). Dewey’s comparison in the early twentieth century was certainly ahead of its time. In 1993 Linda Darling Hammond observed that “with the addition of a few computers, John Dewey’s 1900 vision of the 20th-century ideas is virtually identical to the current scenarios for 21st-century schools” (p.755). Unfortunately for education, Dewey failed to change the system of schooling during his life time but his ideas live on in today’s inquiry rich classrooms.
Science education took center stage with the launch of Sputnik, as American teachers were asked to help mold the next generation of scientists. This time period, from the 1950’s – 1970’s is often called the golden age of science education. Regrettably, science slipped down the list of important subjects in 1977 with the Back to Basics initiative. As its name implies, Back to Basics meant reading, writing, and arithmetic.
In the 1990’s the National Research Council organized a list of national standards for science education which significantly featured Inquiry as a tool for enabling students to understand and master scientific concepts. In fact, there is an entire content standard devoted to inquiry. Science remains the only discipline with inquiry national standards, as the inquiry component of the math standards is omitted in the most recent publication.
The only discipline with national standards that address the context of inquiry is science. The Content Standard for Science as Inquiry states that “As a result of activities in grades K-12, all students should develop [the] abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry [and] understandings about scientific inquiry”(Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards, 18) This Standard is further developed for students at different level into two strands, “Fundamental Abilities Necessary to do Scientific Inquiry” and “Fundamental Understandings About Scientific Inquiry”( Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards, 19) Though the abilities become more complex as a student grows in her academic career, fundamentally students should be able to similar scientific things.
Consider how the level of complexity evolves in the first strand, which focuses on students doing science the way that scientists do science. A K-4 student who is expected to “Plan and conduct a simple investigation” will “Design and conduct a scientific investigation” in junior high and high school. (Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards, 19). Students in K-4 will “Employ simple equipment and tools to gather data and extend the senses” while a 5-8 student will be expected to “Use appropriate tools and techniques to gather, analyze, and interpret data” and a 9-12 student will be expected to “Use technology and mathematics to improve investigations and communications”(Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards, 19).
The goal of the second strand is for students to understand how scientific inquiry actually works. In order to work like a scientist, a student needs to realize how and why scientists do what they do. This strand also increases in complexity as a student progresses through the school system from kindergarten to high school.
Technology has had a profound affect on using inquiry to teach and learn. In 1997 Bertram Bruce and James Levin constructed taxonomy for using media for inquiry with four subcategories. The first subcategory is "Theory building--technology as media for thinking", the second is "Data access--connecting to the world of texts, video, data", the third is "Data collection--using technology to extend the senses", and the fourth subcategory is "Data analysis" (Educational Technology: Media for Inquiry, Communication, Construction, and Expression).
Theory building is a concept that most students struggle with. Whether in a science classroom, a math classroom, or art classroom students often have difficulty with understanding abstract concepts. Technology can help students overcome this problem in several ways. For example, visualization tools such as Biology Workbench allow students to actually see protein and nucleic acid sequences of various organisms. If a student chooses to do a research project on breast cancer, he can compare the genomic sequence of a normal person and a person with the breast cancer gene to discover the genetic differences that contribute to this disease. If a student wishes to see the how the hemoglobin protein structure differs from normal in people who have sickle cell anemia she can find the mutation using the Biology Workbench and then use a program called Protein Explorer to create a 3D model of the mutation.
Data access using technology enables students to retrieve tremendous amounts of information. Library materials that used to be available only to students in large, affluent school districts can now be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection in just minutes. The teacher no longer has to confine her students to learning about what she understands. Instead, the teacher can now focus on collaborating with students and facilitating their learning in a more "learner centered" manner.
Data collection is made easier by the use of technology. Students may never have the means or opportunity to use an electron microscope in a traditional classroom. Thanks to a program called Bugscope they now have that chance. Bugscope is free to classrooms and affords students the chance to collect bugs and see what they look like at magnifications thousands of times greater than the naked eye can see. During a set time students even get to manipulate the electron microscope remotely from their computer lab at school. Music students can analyze musical pieces using software called Humdrum. If a student wanted to know the most common word following "Gloria" in Gregorian chants this software would assist her in her inquiry. There are also probes which interface with software for measuring temperature, pH, UV, etc. For example a student doing river research might want to measure the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water. He could use a probe such as the Vernier Dissolved Oxygen Probe to measure this concentration. The probe interfaces with a computer, TI graphing calculator, or a Palm OS handheld. A program called Logger Pro then gathers the data for analysis
Data analysis is the final step. As already mentioned, one example is Logger Pro. This software allows students to graph hypotheses and trials together for comparison. It synchronizes video and sensor information so students can see the graph change with the actual video of the experiment. Students can even model the data with this software. Another example is using a TI graphing calculator to do statistical analysis. Students can enter data and create histograms, find means, proportions, and standard deviations, and even simulate probability using the TI-83 calculator. There are many, many more TI graphing calculator applications for analyzing data in statistics, as well as geometry, biology, physics, etc
There is a mountain of evidence, both quantitative and qualitative, to support the use of technology in the inquiry rich classroom. It is important to note that the technology is just a tool, like a ruler or calculator, that makes our lives (and the education of our students) easier. Even the most dedicated student will think twice about entering into an investigation that might take hours upon hours to investigate. As teachers, we also know that we only have a tiny slice of time in which to allow students to explore their own questions. Technology allows us to make more of this slice of time. In addition to saving time, technology allows students to ask bigger questions and run experiments that they couldn’t do in school (even without time constraints) to answer these questions.
Many science and math teachers have students explore probability using coins. When dealing with probability, the more trials you do the more reliable your results will be. If you found out today that you had a terrible illness, wouldn’t you rather be treated with the medicine that had been proven in multiple trials to be effective than take the medicine that had only gone through one trial? Most students agree that the medicine that had been proven time and time again would be more reliable. Theoretically they think that they know that they have a fifty percent chance of getting heads when flipping a penny. Is this true? Inquiring minds want to know. How can we test this? Most students will reach in their pockets, pull out a coin, and suggest flipping it to see. They hypothesize that if the chance is fifty percent for getting heads, then flipping it two times will get them one heads and one tails. Realistically they rarely get the expected result when only doing two trials. I have them flip the coin 50-100 times to get closer to the fifty-fifty ratio. Does it work? Usually it is pretty close but it is also tedious and time consuming. What takes a typical class a whole period to do, a computer program can do in seconds. It doesn’t change the content of the lesson, but it is easier and more efficient to let the machine “flip” the coins and the program can do thousands of trials quicker than students can do fifty.
Imagine that a student in a current events class is reading about devastating forest fires. She might want to know why a particular fire burnt an entire forest when another fire only destroyed a small percentage of a different forest. The teacher asks her to devise an experiment to try and answer this question. No teacher is going to tell her it is ok to go start a forest fire and collect data. Why go through the trouble of making up an experiment she can never run? A simulation program from Shodor called “A Better Fire!!” allows her to run this experiment using simple software to simulate how a forest fire burns. She can control wind direction, wind speed, forest density, and in what area of the forest the fire started using the program. She is now able to answer her original question and also come up other questions to investigate.
These are only two of countless examples of how technology actually changes the capacities and dispositions of students. When students realize that they are no longer held back by the limitations of the traditional classroom, their educational possibilities for inquiry are virtually limitless. They will ask more questions and they will discover more answers!
Whether we like it or not, school districts are evaluated on the basis of standardized tests. Those in the trenches of our educational system know that these numbers don’t tell the whole story. A student can be a good tester or a good guesser and score well, having actually learned very little. A different student can fail miserably on a standardized test even though he has learned more than can ever be measured. There is a growing pile of research that suggests that technology in the classroom can improve students’ performance on standardized tests and at the same time improve the real learning taking place in a classroom.
In a summary of the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow project it was concluded that “with technology…students can become active learners, working to effectively acquire new skills as they solve problems.” and being an active learner is at the heart of inquiry based learning. An ICT report states that “computer technology… is especially useful in developing skills such as critical thinking, analysis, and scientific inquiry (Roschelle, Pea, Hoadley, Gordin & Means, 2000)”.
May Lee reported on CNN.com in September of 1998 that “a new study by Educational Testing Service found that computers boosted standardized math scores among fourth- and eighth- graders.”
Diane Curtis and Sara Armstrong wrote about how technology used in concert with project-based learning raises student achievement in the second chapter of Edutopia. They cite research projects that support using technology in a project-based learning environment. Learning through inquiry is an integral part of any project-based curriculum. In fact, Curtis and Armstrong assert that “’disciplined inquiry’ [is] a key component of project-based learning.” (20) They report that Harold Wenglinsky from Educational Testing Service concluded in 1996 that “Computers used for real-world applications such as spreadsheets or to simulate relationships or changing variables were related to increases in student achievement.” (20) In another study spanning five years, SRI International researchers “found that technology-using students in Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project classrooms outperformed non-technology-using students in communication skills, teamwork, and problem solving.” (19) Also a study by The Center for Children and Technology in 1993 that “found that after multimedia technology was used to support project-based learning, eighth graders in Union City scored 27 percentage points higher than students from other urban and special needs school districts on statewide tests in reading, math, and writing achievement.” (21)
Long gone are the days where lecturing at the blackboard filled students with as much education as they would ever need to have. Today’s world is more complicated and therefore requires a more sophisticated curriculum. Students still need to have a solid foundation of the basics, but they also need to understand the underlying concepts and their implications in the real world. Students need to know how to inquire and understand how to find the answers to their inquiries. Inquiry-based learning is student-centered and engaging. When students are engaged in learning about something that matters to them, they are learning things that will be with them for the rest of their lives.
Inquiry is a great way for students to learn about any subject, but inquiry can often take a great deal of time, planning, and money. Who has time to flip a coin 10,000 times? What school district has the resources to use an electron microscope? A marriage between inquiry and technology is a marriage made in heaven. Students can visualize abstract concepts using software in ways that seemed impossible to past generations. Less than a century ago experts in the field of biology had no idea what the structure of our hereditary material looked like. Today, any elementary student who can key in the letters DNA has instant access to a 3D view of the molecule of life. Just one generation ago students doing research had access only to the journals and publications available at their local library. If a student needed more information or different journals, he or she had to travel to the nearest college library. Students now have thousands of volumes of information available to them at the touch of a button. In the past a student took crude measurements using sub-par equipment and recorded them in a notebook for safe keeping and later analysis. Presently, a student can gather data using modern technology that records the data with precision accuracy and interfaces with a program that can arrange the data in an easily understandable format. These advancements in technology have made inquiry-based learning more convenient and effective for teachers and students.
What ever became of the students and their soda can tapping experiment? They marched down to the vending machine, emptied their pockets, and bought all the Mountain Dew they could afford. Back in the classroom, they walked out on the fire escape and shook the soda back and forth ten times. Pointing the soda away from their bodies, they tapped the tops of half of the cans five times each and opened them up. None of them exploded! One student observed that the experiment was not very scientific. What if some students shook more vigorously than others? How many shakes would it take to cause a fizz explosion anyway? Our original inquiry had led to many more questions and future experimentation. We didn’t learn much about forensics that day, but what we discovered and how we discovered it will not likely soon be forgotten.
Bertram, B., Levin, J. “Educational Technology: Media for Inquiry, Communication, Construction, and Expression.” http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/~chips/pubs/taxonomy/index.html.
Chen, M., Armstrong, S. Edutopia: success stories from the digital age. San Francisco, CA: The George Lucas Educational Foundation, 2002.
Darling-Hammond, L. (1993, June). “Reframing the school reform agenda.” Phi Delta Kappan. 74 (10), 753-761.
Lee, M. “Computers boost kids’ test scores” www.cnn.com/US/9809/29/computer.education.
Mothershaw, K. “ICTs and Children – Education.” http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.
National Research Council. Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000.
Parrott, A. Science, Science Education and Technology Timeline.” http://scied.gsu.edu/Hassard/parrott_timeline.html.
Schugurensky, D. “History of Education.” http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/.
“Technology’s Impact on Education Practices.” www.nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/tioep.html.
http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/
http://dactyl.som.ohio-state.edu/Humdrum/index.html
http://education.ti.com/educationportal/
http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/fire2/index.html
http://www.vernier.com/index.html
Last updated December 12, 2004