Constructivist Technology Use

Niederhauser, Dale N. and Denise Lindstrom. "Addressing the NETS for Students Through Constructivist Technology Use in K-12 Classrooms." J. Educational Computing Research. 34.1(2006): 91-128.

The second research article I chose is research done by Dr. Niederhauser, who is an ISU CIT professor, and Denise Lindstrom, who we actually met in this class. I thought since this was close to home and tied in with our class, it would be perfect to summarize for my blog.

This article analyzes how teachers are using technology in the classroom according to the six National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) that were created to promote a more constructivist hands-on use of technology. One interesting thing about their research is that they used anecdotal findings to evaluate their research. They did this by creating questions that teachers answered during an interview which are available at the end of the article. The research included 1078 "technology-using" teachers in K-12 classrooms. By filtering schools based on technology use in a core content area, they had 716 stories that were used for this research. Coding of the data was based on the NETS core ideas...i.e. student use, communicate information, reporting the results, etc.

Standard 1 requires that students are actively engaged in using technology as a tool to help them understand information. The research found that only 38 of the 716 teachers used technology exclusively for students to absorb such as showing videos or searching online for information. The other teachers did engage their students in using either hardware or software to develop their technological skills. There is a chart that shows that computers (hardware) and web browsers (software) were used by students most often.

Standard 2 requires students to be responsible, critical, and ethical users of technology. It is interesting that only 58 of the 716 teachers reported any mention of responsible use like citing sources or avoiding inappropriate sites. I think it's interesting because web browsers are the most used software tool. Another aspect of standard 2 is collaborative work which was pervasive in many teacher stories. Most instances were "intentional collaboration" where they were teamed up, but some were "spontaneous collaboration" where students helped each other when needed. This standard is important for 21st century workplace skills of collaboration and cooperation.

Standard 3 addresses using technology to enhance creativity and learning. They coded the types of products students produced. Some examples included first graders creating a KidPix original graphic, desktop publishing document, and graphic organizer in Kidspiration. Seventy five percent of the activities reported had kids creating at least one product with technology. The products are moving from word processed to desktop published documents which shows a move towards greater creativity and higher-order thinking skills. Multimedia presentations were actually the most created product using software like HyperStudio and PowerPoint.

Standard 4 wants students to be able to successfully communicate with others within and beyond the classroom. They coded one-way and two-way communication of their data. Seventy four percent were one-way communication where mostly students would present a powerpoint to their class. Because constructivist theory says students should be engaged in real-world tasks, they also looked at audience as either inside the classroom, inside the school, and outside the school. In only 8 percent of the cases, students communicated to an outside audience which did not include their families. One group worked on a service-learning project which required communication for an animal shelter. Only 7 percent of the cases involved students interacting with an outside audience through something like email or blog.

Standard 5 requires students use technology to retrieve information (research). They also need to be able to select the appropriate tool to collect information and analyze it. Most commonly students located or collected information. Several activities combined different research skills. They believed the activities where students used teacher-selected websites were merely collecting information but unable to use the real-world skill of analyzing reliability of websites they found on their own. The cases where students evaluated reliability were rare.

Standard 6 is very important. It addresses the need for students to use technology for problem-solving and decision-making. They discuss using real-world, ill-structured problems as the best activities because they allow for multiple "correct" answers. They do not limit the students' ability to search out information they think is relevant. Overly structured activities do not encourage students to develop problem-solving skills. As mentioned earlier, multimedia presentations were widely created but only 28 percent of them actually involved students in a real-world meaningful task.

They found in their conclusion that teachers are beginning to use technology in ways that students need to become proficient according to the NETS but the NETS were definitely not fully addressed through the types of activities teachers were using. They wanted to emphasize that teachers failed to help students become aware of ethical issues, communicate with outside world, use technology in meaningful research, and develop strong problem-solving skills.

That is a long summary of the article, but it is pretty long. I liked that they used anecdotal data to conduct their research because it gives more life to the actual technology use going on in classrooms. I was appalled by the small number of teachers who either feel unable or do not understand the importance of teaching their students about responsible internet use. That is definitely something that needs to be emphasized because without providing these ill-structured problem solving opportunities, students will not be given the opportunity to explore what the WWW has to offer. They will constantly be relying on their teachers to tell them which sites they can and cannot use. Of course some kids will take advantage of being given that freedom, but they have to learn somewhere. Better at school than somewhere they aren't being monitored.