ICT in Education

All about: Integrating Educational technology into teaching (Robyler, Edwards & Harviluk 1997)

April 21, 2007

Robyler, M. D., Edwards, J., & Havriluk, M. A. (1997). Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching (pp. 54-79). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Ok well this is a slightly more sizable piece of writing, let’s see how I go here.

Again, essentially an overview of differences between behaviourist/cognitivist (here referred to as directed instruction) and constructivist theory and practice.

Chapter begins with a guide to what is to be covered, a nice “advanced organiser” approach which gives the learner a mental framework to hang the new knowledge on.

• Information age means that we are constantly playing catchup and learning to learn is seen by many as a key skill.
• Need to become more effective decision makers.
• Directed Instruction = Behaviourism + Information processing branch of cognitivism
• Constructivism = comes from other branches of cognitivism (mainly a reaction to directed instruction approaches)
• Both theories focus on what Gagne calls “the conditions of learning”

Strengths of Directed Instruction approach

• can allow for individual pacing (students can be busy while teacher supports slower students)
• efficient (skill practice through drills)
• provides foundation skills needed for higher level skills
• instruction is replicable, quality is consistent
• some students like a structured learning environment

Strengths of Constructivist approach

• encourages higher level skills – problem solving, teamwork/collaboration, critical thinking, research
• adds context/relevance as a motivator and to anchor learning to students experiences
• students pushed to figure out what they need to learn to solve problems

Tennyson (1990) claims that about 30% of learning time should be spent on “acquiring knowledge” (e.g. verbal info and procedural knowledge) and 70% spent on the “employment of knowledge” (e.g., contextual skills, cognitive strategies and creative processes)

More about Directed Instruction:

• learning as a sequence of stimulus and response (response is the best indicator that learning has occurred)
• teachers and resources are the stimuli, skills demonstrated are the response
• information processing theory – learning = input variables (info) + processor (attention + short/long term memory) + outputs (responses)
• inputs that receive attention go to short-term memory (stm) for 5-20 secs, then on to long term (ltm) (hopefully)
• teachers shape info to make it more likely to move from stm to ltm, give practice exercises to help it.

Gagne’s events of instruction

1. Gaining attention
2. Informing the learner of the objective
3. Stimulating the recall of prerequisite info
4. Presenting new material
5. Providing learning guidance (cognitivist tools ?)
6. Eliciting performance
7. Providing feedback about correctness
8. Assessing performance
9. Enhancing retention and recall

Gagne’s learning hierarchy – build base skills first needed for more complex ones.

Systematic instructional design / Systems approaches – step by step process for preparing instructional materials

Problems with Directed Instruction approach

• leads to standardised testing => (teaching to the test)
• regimented
• weak support for higher level skills of problem solving etc
• more oriented to individuals, not group work (which is more prevalent in “the real world”)

More about Constructivism

The more I read about Constructivism, the more it annoys me. It’s ill defined, it seems to identify itself largely in terms of what it isn’t (i.e. directed instruction) and while some of it’s ideas are common sense – using real world examples to add motivation to content, using multimedia, developing problem solving and critical reflection skills – they seem fairly easy to apply to other approaches.

I’m also unconvinced about the obsession with collaborative group work (how do you ensure that all members of the group have digested the required knowledge and aren’t just coasting) as it seems oriented to creating happy little worker drones.

Some of the ideas about allowing learners all the time they want to discover things and also letting them learn things in the ways that they think are most suited seem completely divorced from the reality of a classroom. (Particularly in the VET sector).

I can see some use in a collaborative approach that encompasses students from a range of disciplines – for example, putting on a major music festival, with a student from design, p.r, public events, OHS etc I guess.

Anyway, this is what Robyler et al. have to say about it.

• focus on students motivation to learn and relevance to the real world
• activities meaningful to a student’s own experience
• provides scaffolding through supervised collaborative activities

According to Piaget: sometimes they fit new experiences into their existing schemes or patterns of behaviour, a process he called assimilation; sometimes they change their existing schemes to incorporate new experiences, which he called accommodation.

According to Lev Vygotsky: “children begin learning from the world around them, their social world, which is the source of all their concepts, ideas, facts, skills and attitudes”

According to Bruner: Discovery learning is an approach to instruction through which students interact with their environment – by exploring and manipulating objects, wrestling with questions and controversies or performing experiments

Teachers have found that discovery learning is most successful when students have prerequisite knowledge and undergo some structured experiences

According to Rand Spiro (et al.) :Cognitive Flexibility theory – calls for students to generate not only solutions to new problems but also the prior knowledge needed to solve the problems.

According to CTGV: Inert knowledge is “knowledge that can usually be recalled when people are explicitly asked to do so but is not used spontaneously in problem solving even though it is relevant”

Constructivist approaches:

• Problem oriented activities
• Visual mental models of problems to be solved
• Rich media environments
• Cooperative/collaborative group learning
• Learning through exploration
• Qualitative assessment – student portfolios, teacher narratives of student work habits, performance based assessments in combination with checklists of criteria for judging student performance

Problems with Constructivism:

• “Many teachers are still bound by the constraints of required curricula and they must ensure that their students accomplish existing district objectives as well as newer, more constructivist ones”
• Sometimes instructional activities based on constructivist models are more time-consuming, since they may call for teachers to organise and facilitate group work and to evaluate in authentic ways. By comparison, paper-and-pencil tests are both quicker to develop and easier to administer
• Papert feels that learning activities should be fairly unstructured and open-ended, frequently with no goal in mind other than discovery of “powerful ideas”
• How can one certify skill learning? – Just because a team of med students succeed in an operation, can all of them do it
• Are students able to find their own prior knowledge?
• Can students learn this knowledge in the best way?
• Little evidence that skills learnt this way do actually transfer to real world situations
• Minimal objective evidence to back it up.

Technology Integration Strategies

These are a few of the reasons that the writers offer to make more use of technology in the classroom.

Directed Models

• Self paced drills/tutorials allow lagging students to spend time catching up and make them feel less self-conscious
• Drill and practice help prerequisite skills become more automatic
• Advanced tutorials/resources can be made available to advanced students wishing to skip ahead
• I.T tools such as Word, CAD etc reduce some logistical tools – don’t teach skills in themselves but make production of student work easier
• I.T tools optimise scarce resources – stationery, teachers, simulations of lab experiments

Constructivist Models

• Add motivation
• Support creativity
• Allow for reflection
• Using more visual models of problems and creation of multimedia helps bypass literacy issues in some students
• Enhances cooperative work

Issues to consider in introducing technology to teaching

• Assessment for constructivist activities should be planned to occur over long time-frames
• Assessment should dovetail with the activities
• Flexibility is important – might need to change things as you are going
• Finding a balance between directed and constructivist approaches requires some experimentation.

Parts I’m unsure of

• Constructivists claim use of multimedia etc as relatively unique tool to overcome lack of base skills (eg literacy) but it can be used in any approach
• Simply accepting literacy problems and finding work-arounds feels wrong – literacy is a fundamental skill
• Critical reflection requires the ability to assess data and sources but more importantly the learner needs to care about it in the first place

Entry Filed under: 911, behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism, directed instruction, e-learning, eLearning, education design, prescriptive, strategies, technology. .