A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Using Technology to Support Education Reform -- September 1993

Challenges for Students Using Technology

Many adults have feared that students, especially so-called "at-risk students", would become frustrated by the technical demands of the kinds of technologies described above. Experience suggests to the contrary that learning the technical aspects of working with technology is not a major problem for most students. Students face several other kinds of challenges when they use technology to support them in active, inquiry learning, however. These include:

Understanding Their Responsibilities as Active Learners

Authentic inquiry tasks provide exciting new challenges for students and can also require a host of advanced intellectual and social learning skills, involving new levels of independence. Peggy Healy Stearns (1991c) noted that for many of the students participating in the Software Evaluation Project and using Point of View to create multimedia presentations, working in cooperative groups was an innovation in its own right. The social studies teacher needed to help students develop productive working relationships, so that they could cooperatively research the topics and create a presentation to share with their classmates.

Teachers in that project and others we have discussed find that they need to explain to students explicitly that their responsibilities in these programs are different from the usual role of "listening, remembering, and repeating what the teacher told them" (Wiske 1990, p. 8). Developing their own questions is the reverse of the role that many students have honed anticipating answers to factual and narrowly focused teacher questions. Students' difficulties with conjecturing with Geometric Supposer were more acute when teachers did not provide clear models and facilitation, and they didn t grasp the kind of thinking they were to do.

You have to start it all on your own. She'll [the teacher] give us a little something. The sheets that we work on will say a little something. We have to come up with everything. That's what we're supposed to do. We're not complaining. It's just a little hard sometimes. Maybe we are complaining.

He lets us do anything we want for conjectures, but it doesn't help me at all in thinking them up.

More important, the kinds of inquiry learning teachers are trying to catalyze with Voyage of the Mimi, Geometric Supposer, and technology-supported inquiry learning in the MAKE IT HAPPEN! program may challenge students fundamental view of what teaching and learning are all about. With these innovations, learning is no longer a process in which a teacher who knows all passes on knowledge and students passively take it in. Grasping how different her work with Geometric Supposer was from her other classes, one student mused that:

It's different. It's like abstract thinking. It's different than anything else you've ever done-maybe a little harder than I expected. We have to think about everything that you learn, instead of just having a teacher teach you, memorize it, and just do it. You have to think about it yourself. (Yerushalmy, Chazan & Gordon 1990, p.27)

Some students need step-by-step guidance when becoming familiar with a new procedure for generating questions, gathering information, or carrying out a cooperative task; others, and most students over time, need a reminder of the "big picture". They need considerable discussion in the early stages of a new activity, less when their investigation is well under way.

Getting Help with Individual Learning Needs

Although the kinds of inquiry learning these programs foster is appropriate for all students, many students need special support to manage the social and intellectual challenges of posing and exploring their own questions and in sustaining attention and involvement in long-term projects. EDC's Problem Solving in Science project found that students with even mild learning problems may need considerable coaching in computer-based cooperative learning activities.

This issue was highlighted in observations of a fifth-grade class using Voyage of the Mimi, taught by a highly experienced science specialist who had introduced the program to many teachers in his district (Morocco & Dalton 1990). EDC observers followed a bright boy, Max, who had a high interest in science but some learning difficulties, through the several-week unit. Max easily learned the navigation skills and software procedures but was unable to sustain the level of cooperation required by the course. Rigidly critical of the ways members of his group used their navigation tools, Max disrupted their work and wandered in the room a good deal. More than once, he would seize a tool from another student's hands as he was plotting coordinates, with You can t do it that way! Despite good ideas and skills, he was gradually excluded from the cooperative activities by his exasperated peers.

In that same classroom, the research team followed another boy with learning difficulties. Aaron managed to mask his lack of understanding of basic navigation concepts with an amiable and attentive manner. However, he let the others in his group make most of the navigation decisions while he looked on. When Aaron finally had to take a turn at the keyboard in a computer simulation requiring that students apply navigation skills to locating and saving a whale, the other students usually directed him through his confusion. In one competition, a girl in his group placed her fingers over his on the keyboard to help him select the correct commands, so that their group would not fall behind the others.

In a hands-on performance assessment by EDC staff at the end of the unit, Max showed that he knew the navigation games perfectly although the other students would no longer play with him. Aaron was totally unable to manage the computer procedures and did not know the underlying navigation concepts. Viewing videotapes of the performance assessments, the teacher was astonished at Max'ssocial difficulties and at Aaron'stotal lack of grasp of the navigation material (Morocco & Dalton 1990). The challenges for the teacher were sobering, knowing what students are actually learning in this kind of complex learning environment and providing the different kinds of support required, particularly with several groups engaged in cooperative learning activities.

These cases and other research reports point up the subtle variation in the learning strengths and needs students bring to computer-supported inquiry learning. They point to the challenge for teachers of assessing students' learning in a complex, simulated learning environment (see Chapter IV for a further discussion of assessment). In all of these programs, there are multiple student learning outcomes at stake: acquiring new information, posing "researchable" questions, linking visual and print information, developing specialized computer skills for working with databases or computer games, cooperative abilities, reasoning and problem-solving abilities. Clearly, teachers need multiple assessment techniques and associated intervention strategies to meet varied student needs.

Within the classroom, close monitoring of students learning can enable all students to benefit from reform-oriented learning activities. Beyond the classroom, particularly in middle and high schools that are in transition from traditional approaches to more inquiry-oriented approaches, students may need help in making sense of the differences in their experiences and their teachers' expectations across their learning settings.


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This page was last updated December 27, 2001 (jca)