Technology & The Transformation of Education

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia

[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

In last week’s, E-Learning and Student Success, I expressed concern about Ontario’s plan to require students to take four of the 30 credits required for graduation on-line. I expressed hope that those responsible for planning and implementing the change would consider the capacities of adolescent learners. Notwithstanding those concerns, what students will learn and how they learn will both be influenced by changes in information and communication technologies.

New, and increasingly sophisticated, technologies will enable teachers to conduct pre-assessments of what students know and are able to do in a domain. That information will enable teachers to link instruction closely with students’ prior knowledge, allowing them to plan instruction better matched to their students’ current level of understanding.

Technologies will provide more focused opportunities for student practice and remediation. Teachers will be able to make provision for individual students who require additional practice in order to achieve mastery of a procedure (adding, subtracting, multiplying, etc.) and become fluent in the use of the procedure. Teachers will do so by employing applications that can customize the practice problems to the individual student’s characteristics and needs, monitor the student’s success, and adjust the difficulty of new practice problems. The increased use of this and other adaptive technologies will help to reduce the gaps between students in terms of their mastery of fundamental conceptual and procedural knowledge.

Adaptive technologies have the potential to reduce early school leaving due to lack of challenge. These technologies will be able to customize problems to enable students who have mastered fundamental concepts and procedures to apply them in new and more challenging contexts. The judicious and carefully constructed use of technology will provide students with opportunities to solve problems with the conceptual and procedural knowledge they have acquired.

Problem solving need not and should not be confined to extensions or challenges for concepts and procedures already mastered. There are many elements of science and social studies in which problem solving is an appropriate vehicle for learning. There are quite a few simulation games that have been developed over the years that prompt users to design, build and manage cities and nations that must confront a variety of issues over the course of their development. The ubiquity of smartphones, inexpensive laptops and tablets will enable more deliberate use of such programs in schools. 

A related development is the use of technology to give students the experience of being in an environment that they might not otherwise experience or to immerse students in an environment for the purpose of exploration.  While virtual experiences have existed for some time, the proliferation of inexpensive devices and the exponential increase in bandwidth will enable teachers to use them more extensively and deliberately.

The more deliberate and extensive use of new technologies will have a significant impact on teachers and teaching. There will be teachers responsible for the management of the learning of a group of learners much as a general practitioner physician manages the health of a patient.

There will be educational technologists who, working under the direction of teachers, will identify the various technologies that may be mobilized to support a student’s learning. There will also be subject specialist teachers who are responsible for diagnosing the learner’s needs in their areas of specialization and planning an instructional sequence to enable the students to progress from where they are to where they should be according to the established curriculum. 

General practitioner teachers will ensure coordination among specialists and technologists, monitor the implementation of the learning plans of students for whom they are responsible, communicate with and report progress to parents and guardians. They will collaborate with teacher technologists and specialist teachers to assess, plan, implement and evaluate the student’s progress. They will also be adept in marshalling the services and resources that students with special needs require to succeed and will be the primary point of contact for their parents and guardians.

Technology will figure prominently in the management of student learning and in communication with parents and among staff members. It will facilitate student self-assessment and increase their autonomy as learners, desirable changes that will help prepare them for a life of learning. But, as I said last week, these changes must be carefully planned and implemented. That means they must consider learner characteristics and capacities.

E-Learning & Student Success

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia
[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

No longer a novelty, e-learning is almost routine for most us. When contemplating a new recipe, trying to learn a complex photo editing program, and refreshing my memory of the syntax for a spreadsheet formula, my go-to solution is instructional videos found on the internet. I am often successful. My cooking is edible, I removed wrinkles from scanned copies of old family photos and created a spreadsheet of our household expenses.

I’ve had some challenges along the way. I struggled with the photo-editing program and the related videos. When I mentioned my difficulty with the photo-editing program to my grandson, he said, “yeah, getting all of those layers to work is the key, but it is hard.”

The video on electrical wiring did not mention removing or adding (I have forgotten which) a metallic bridge between the upper and lower outlets in the kitchen. My lack of knowledge blew the circuit in our unit and all the other units in our building. On Labour Day weekend. Luckily, that catastrophe was resolved by a call to a helpful electrician who told me what to do over the phone.

What brought e-learning to mind was the announcement by the Government of Ontario that, beginning in the 2020-2021 school year, students will be required to take four of the 30 credits required for graduation through e-learning. The e-learning notice was one of many changes the government will make under the banner of “modernizing education.”

There were few details when the announcement was made in March, making it difficult to know whether e-learning will be blended with classroom instruction, a regularly scheduled event, or something that students should pursue on their own schedule. It mentions that ‘class size’ will be limited to 35, implying that students will learn with guidance from a teacher. But it doesn’t say whether the teacher will convene sessions for groups of students or the whole class. Working out these details and many others will be crucial to student success.

To the extent that I was a successful e-learner, the success depended on a range of factors. I was highly self-motivated to acquire the knowledge I needed for cooking, photo-editing, performing repetitive calculations, and even rewiring the outlets in our kitchen (except for the circuit-blowing episode). I had plenty of time to learn and review because I had no due dates or deadlines. I was determined to complete each of the tasks. And, although some of the video tutorials were part of a larger course or package, I could focus all my attention on the part that I was pursuing.

I am long past being an adolescent, but, when I was, I possessed few of the attributes I applied to my more recent e-learning.  I acquired what discipline I possess today with support (and prodding) from my teachers.

My grandson will enter grade 10 in Toronto the year that e-learning will become a mandatory feature of Ontario's secondary education system. I'm concerned that the implementation of e-learning considers the supports students will need to succeed. My grandson is an intelligent young man who is at ease with technology. He taught himself to edit sound and video. When he needs advice, he calls his grandmother who is a film and video editor. They discuss timecode, aspect ratios, 2K vs. 4K, and other things that are unfamiliar to me.

But as intelligent and comfortable with technology as he is, my grandson possesses about as much discipline as I had when I was his age. He procrastinates. He needs encouragement even when confronted with deadlines. He can be extremely focussed and remarkably indifferent at the same time. He is like most of us when we were his age.

There are many excellent online courses for the highly motivated and disciplined learner. I hope that the folks in Ontario remember what they were like in high school and plan e-learning accordingly. My grandson’s education and the education of his peers will depend upon how well they do.

“things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

I read that the line “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” from Yeats’ poem describing Europe after the First World War has been quoted more often in the past year or two than in the preceding 90 years. No doubt events in Europe – Brexit, increasing xenophobia, mass migrations – and the behaviour of Donald Trump may have encouraged others to recall the verse, as I have. But even in the absence of those events, the pace of change and its centrifugal forces should prompt us to ask about what prevents things from falling apart and the centre from holding.

Observant riders of public transport will have noticed that there is little conversation among the many passengers whose attention has been absorbed by their smartphones and tablets. Indeed, it is not infrequent that a couple dining out are attending to their phones rather than to one another.

Because of our access to the internet, we probably have more information at our fingertips and exercise less critical capacity about that information than at any previous time in human civilization. Neil Postman used the phrase “we are amusing ourselves to death” to refer to the narcotizing impact of television on rational thought. Postman’s view was that the medium of communication and its features take precedence over, and in most cases overwhelm, the content. It is difficult to apply serious mental effort to a tweet or to public affairs broadcasts in which antagonists appeal to people’s emotions and prejudices rather than reason and evidence. Hence the numbing effect of television and, by extension, internet-based technologies.

I do not oppose these technologies. I am as frequent an (ab)user of them as many of my fellow passengers. But the use of fugitive material from internet sources increases the need for a set of critical faculties that enables people to distinguish among different types of claims and the kinds of evidence one needs to adjudicate those claims.

The internet environment does not reduce the need for schooling (everything I learned, I learned from the internet) as is sometimes claimed. Electronic media magnify the importance of the contribution that schools make to the acquisition of critical faculties, standards that evidence must meet, and standards for determining the trustworthiness of sources. 

At one time religious institutions and closely knit families and communities worked together to counteract the centrifugal forces driving people apart. The increasingly complex demands on families, the diminution of the importance of religion in people’s lives, and the fragmentation of communities have left public school as the primary agency of socialization. The public school is one of the few institutions capable of communicating our shared values, integrating us all into the fabric of the society we share.  

One of the many implications of the centrality of schools to social cohesion is that we must be conscious of the values that we share and aware of the forces capable of eroding them. The substitution of appeals to emotion and prejudices for deep and critical thought is very divisive. However, it is more difficult for those with totalitarian impulses or designs to steal our rights when we know them well and understand the importance of the institutions that ensure those rights.

Teaching about rights and institutions was once a central part of public schooling. Though it is still one of the things that schools do, its place is less central than it once was - and needs to be - to counteract the narcotizing and centrifugal influences with which the young must contend.

It is to public schooling that we should look to preventing things from falling apart. They are the centres that can hold us together when it appears that the centre cannot hold.

“. . . preparing students for the future, rather than just knowledge.”

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

I was troubled by a statement made by a student named Josh in an article describing B.C.'s new high school curriculum: Genocide and Indigenous studies, drones and mechatronics, more projects, fewer exams. Josh, who hopes to study finance at an Ontario university next year, said, “I feel there is a bigger focus on preparing students for the future, rather than just knowledge.”

I presume that, in contrast to subject-specific knowledge, Josh was referring to the emphasis on skills such as being self-motivated, having a positive attitude, communicating clearly and respectfully, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking, etc. These are all useful skills to have now and for the future, but they are no substitute for knowledge. Subject-specific knowledge plays a part in many, if not all, of them.

Problem-solving and critical thinking are not independent of subject-knowledge. The standards for thinking critically and solving problems in health are different from the standards for making judgments in chemistry that, in turn, are different from the standards in engineering. People need knowledge in order to make judgments that often depend on critical distinctions between concepts.

In all fields, knowing the difference between key concepts is central to thinking clearly and solving problems, and communicating and working with one’s colleagues. The key concepts are the common language that practitioners in a field share and, without which, they cannot understand one another.

If Josh pursues his studies in finance, he will learn soon enough that there is a difference between depreciation and amortization. If he pursues studies in the sciences, he’ll learn the difference between vaporization and evaporation. If he switches to history, the disposition he acquired to inquire will prove helpful, but he will also need to learn the difference between a revolution and a coup d’état. The teamwork Josh learns will be very useful if he pursues studies in music, but he will need to distinguish between rhythm and tempo. His inter-personal communication and sensitivity skills will prove indispensable in theatre studies, where he will learn the difference between drama and melodrama.

BC’s new curriculum includes topics such as genocide and fields such as Indigenous studies. If he pursues either or both, Josh will learn the differences between genocide and fratricide, and between indigenous and aboriginal.

Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995 and the author of the UNESCO Report Learning: The Treasure Within called attention to four categories of learning that Delors felt were necessary in a society that strives toward democracy and citizenship:

• Learning to know: by combining a sufficiently broad general knowledge with the opportunity to work in depth on a small number of subjects. This also means learning to learn, so as to benefit from the opportunities education provides throughout life.
• Learning to do: in order to acquire not only an occupational skill but also, more broadly, the competence to deal with many situations and work in teams. It also means learning to do in the context of young peoples’ various social and work experiences which may be informal, as a result of the local or national context, or formal, involving courses, alternating study and work.
• Learning to live together: by developing an understanding of other people and an appreciation of interdependence – carrying out joint projects and learning to manage conflicts – in a spirit of respect for the values of pluralism, mutual understanding and peace.
• Learning to be: so as better to develop one’s personality and be able to act with ever greater autonomy, judgement and personal responsibility. In that connection, education must not disregard any aspect of a person’s potential: memory, reasoning, aesthetic sense, physical capacities and communication skills (p.37).

Delors’ four categories are a useful way to think about the contribution of schools and teachers to the development of the next generation.

Learning to do without learning to know, learning to live together and learning to be would make us one-dimensional and not very useful to ourselves or our society.

Reference
Delors J. et al. (1996). Learning: The treasure within. Report to UNESCO of the international      commission on education for the twenty-first century. Paris: UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000109590

Another salvo in the math wars

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia [permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s pledge to eliminate inquiry oriented math (sometimes referred to pejoratively as “discovery math”) is one of the most recent volleys in the mathematics war. Ford’s pledge, made in the heat of an election campaign, politicized a long-simmering argument about the teaching and learning of mathematics.

In 1999 - many scientists, mathematicians, and educators in the US signed an open letter published in the Washington Post. They called into question ten mathematics programs considered exemplary by the U.S. Department of Education. The letter was written in part because parents had beseeched its author, David Klein, to help them do something about the way mathematics was being taught.

In April of the following year Klein wrote an article in the April 2000 issue of the American School Board Journal, accusing the U.S. Department of Education of promoting programs that de-­emphasized arithmetic and algebra. Klein compared mathematics to martial arts and music. “A novice cannot hope to achieve mastery in the martial arts without first learning basic katas or exercises in movement,” argued Klein. “A violinist who has not mastered elementary bowing techniques and vibrato has no hope of evoking the emotions of an audience through sonorous tones and elegant phrasing. Arguably the most hierarchical of human endeavors, mathematics also depends on sequential mastery of basic skills.”

   

Preferring evidence to emotion, my colleagues and I recently reviewed a segment of the vast literature devoted to mathematics that addressed the question “What are effective instructional practices in K-12 mathematics education?” The research we examined* indicates that direct or explicit instruction has a positive impact on mathematics performance and achievement. When teachers provide students with explicit step-by-step instructions about how to use problem solving strategies, paired with extensive practice, learning outcomes are positive across age groups and student populations.

The effectiveness of teacher-facilitated instruction and inquiry-based mathematics is less conclusive. While the effects seem to be positive, they also tend to be small. Some authors suggest that authentic problem solving and facilitated learning may be effective after students have learned foundational concepts and procedures. 

David Robitaille, the Canadian study director for the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, a collaborative effort of forty-two nations, agrees with the critics who say students need to know the basics. “You can’t be comfortable doing mathematics if you have to think about what seven times eight is. And you shouldn’t need to use a calculator to estimate the cost of several purchases at a store.” He argues that students need to develop good “number sense” and a high level of comfort with numbers and how they work. On the other hand, Robitaille says that students do not need to do worksheets of long division with multi-digit dividends and divisors.

Other practices that affect achievement include peer-assisted learning, the use of visuals and manipulatives, and the provision of feedback to teachers and students about their progress. Peer-assisted learning has a consistent positive effect on achievement and performance, but the magnitude of the impact differs across studies. Providing feedback to students also tends to improve mathematics achievement, though the magnitude of the effect also varies. Visuals and manipulatives can be effective, but their effect seems to be limited to specific types of skills (e.g., retention and problem solving) and requires carefully planned and executed instruction.

There is a range of instructional programs for teaching mathematics. The evidence seems to favour those that focus on one specific math content area rather than those that focus on multiple content areas. The instructional techniques found to be effective for students with special needs are much the same as the techniques that have been found to be successful for students without special needs. Direct instruction (explicit instruction) seems to be particularly effective with this population.

I lament the politicization of mathematics instruction or instruction in any subject because it encourages people to choose sides depending upon the personalities involved and the emotions those personalities evoke rather than considering the evidence. When the evidence is ignored it is to the detriment of everyone, but especially students and teachers.

* A list of the references that informed our judgments about effective instructional practices in mathematics is available upon request. Please send an email to On.Education.Canada@gmail.com.