How People Learn Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (2000) / Chapter Skim
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9 Technology to Support Learning
9 Technology to Support Learning
Pages 206-230
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From page 206... ...
In contrast is the view that money spent on technology, and time spent by students using technology, are money and time wasted (see Education Policy Network, 19971. Several groups have reviewed the literature on technology and learning and concluded that it has great potential to enhance student achievement and teacher learning, but only if it is used appropriately (e.g., Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1996; President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, 1997; Dede, 19981.
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From page 207... ...
Technology can help to create an active environment in which students not only solve problems, but also find their own problems. This approach to learning is very different from the typical school classrooms, in which students spend most of their time learning facts from a lecture or text and doing the problems at the end of the chapter.
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From page 208... ...
A number of video- and computer-based learning programs are now in use, with many different purposes. The Voyage of the Mimi, developed by Bank Street College, was one of the earliest attempts to use video and computer technology to introduce students to real-life problems (e.g., Char and Hawkins, 19871: students "go to sea" and solve problems in the context of learning about whales and the Mayan culture of the Yucatan.
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From page 209... ...
In many of these student-scientist partnerships, students collect data that are used to understand global issues; a growing number of them involve students from geographically dispersed schools who interact through the Internet. For example, Global Lab supports an international community of student researchers from more than 200 schools in 30 countries who construct new knowledge about their local and global environments (Tinker and Berenfeld, 1993,19941.
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From page 210... ...
indicate their selfconfidence with respect to mathematics, their belief in the utility of mathematics, their current interest in mathematics, and their feelings about complex math challenges. Figure 9.1 shows positive attitude changes from the beginning to the end of the school year for students in the interactive video challenge series, with negative changes falling below the midline of the graph, as shown for most of the students in the comparison groups.
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From page 212... ...
Using scientific visualization software, specially modified for learning, students have access to the same research tools and datasets that scientists use. In one 5-week activity, "Student Conference on Global Warming," supported by curriculum units, learner-centered scientific visualization tools and data, and assessment rubrics available through the CoVis Geosciences web server, students across schools and states evaluate the evidence for global warming and consider possible trends and consequences (Gordin et al.,
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From page 213... ...
These staging activities specify themes for open-ended collaborative learning projects to follow. In laying out typical questions and data useful to investigate the potential impact of global warming on a country or a country's potential impact on global warming, a general framework is used in which students specialize by selecting a country, its specific data, and the particular issue for their project focus (e.g., rise in carbon-dioxide emissions due to recent growth, deforestation, flooding due to rising sea levels)
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From page 214... ...
. For example, in the Little Planet Literacy Series, engaging video-based adventures encourage kindergarten, first-, and second-grade students to write books to solve challenges posed at the end of the adventures.
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From page 215... ...
As described above, students with new technological tools can communicate across a network, work with datasets, develop scientific models, and conduct collaborative investigations into meaningful science issues. Since the late 1980s, cognitive scientists, educators, and technologists have suggested that learners might develop a deeper understanding of phenomena in the physical and social worlds if they could build and manipulate 215
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From page 216... ...
The educational software and exploration and discovery activities developed for the GenScope Project use simulations to teach core topics in genetics as part of precollege biology. The simulations move students through a hierarchy of six key genetic concepts: DNA, cell, chromosome, organism, pedigree, and population (Neumann and Horowitz, 19971.
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From page 217... ...
by using an inquiry cycle that helps students see where they are in the inquiry process, plus processes called reflective assessment in which students reflect on their own and each others' inquiries. Experiments conducted with typical seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade students in urban, public middle schools revealed that the software modeling tools made the difficult subject of physics understandable as well as interesting to a wide range of students.
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From page 218... ...
~ ~ . ~ ~ ~ _ ~ ~ ~ ~ 0 i 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 1 10 MAT math SCOre FIGURE 9.4 Mercer Island versus comparable school mechanics vinal and MAT math | scores.
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From page 219... ...
Like other technologies, however, Classtalk does not guarantee effective learning. The visual histograms are intended to promote t~vo-way communication in large lecture classes: as a springboard for class discussions in which students justify the procedures they used to arrive at their answers, listen critically to the arguments of others, and refute them or offer other reasoning strategies.
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From page 220... ...
Furthermore, students at all ability levels participate effectively: in fact, in classrooms using the technology in the most collaborative fashion, CSILE's positive effects were particularly strong for lower- and middle-ability groups (Bryson and Scardamalia, 19911. As one of its many uses to support learning, the Internet is increasingly being used as a forum for students to give feedback to each other.
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From page 221... ...
Similar functions are provided by SpeakEasy, a software tool used to structure and support dialogues among engineering students and their instructors (Hoadley and Bell, 19961. Sophisticated tutoring environments that pose problems are also now available and give students feedback on the basis of how experts reason and organize their knowledge in physics, chemistry, algebra, computer programming, history, and economics (see Chapter 21.
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From page 222... ...
The descriptive paragraphs At; ~ he matched student pairs made draw~e of the "second-generation draw~e descriptive narearanhs could re~ - mplete specification led to a The students executed the same steps of writing, exchange of paragraphs, drawing, and reflection, in the Mondrian stage, this time starting with the art of abstract expressionists such as Mondrian, Klee, and Rothko. In the Me stage, students studied self-portraits of famous painters and then produced portraits of themselves, which they attempted to describe with enough detail so that their distant partners could produce portraits matching their own.
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From page 223... ...
The students' artwork, descriptive paragraphs, and reflections are available on a project website at http://www.barron.palo-alto.ca.us/hoover/mmm/mmm.html. clans as they performed the hardest real-world troubleshooting tasks, 20 to 25 hours of Sherlock training was the equivalent of about 4 years of on-thejob experience.
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From page 224... ...
Universities and businesses, for example, have helped communities upgrade the quality of teaching in schools. Engineers and scientists who work in industry often play a mentoring role with teachers (e.g., University of California-Irvine Science Education Program)
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From page 225... ...
Researchers compared achievement levels of ninth- grade students in the tutored classrooms (experimental group) with achievement in more traditional algebra classrooms.
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From page 226... ...
For example, a major purpose of the Kids as Global Scientists (KGS) research project a worldwide clusters of students, scientist mentors, technology experts, and experts in pedagogy- is to identify key components that make these communities successful (Songer, 19931.
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From page 227... ...
Examples of these communities include the LabNet Project, which involves over 1,000 physics teachers (Ruopp et al., 19931; Bank Street College's Mathematics Learning project; the QUILL network for Alaskan teachers of writing (Rubin, 19921; and the HumBio Project, in which teachers are developing biology curricula over the network (Keating, 1997; Keating and Rosenquist, 19981. WEBCSILE, an Internet version of the CSILE program described above, is being used to help create teacher communities.
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From page 228... ...
A challenge in providing professional development for new teachers is allowing them adequate time to observe accomplished teachers and to try their own wings in classrooms, where innumerable decisions must be made in the course of the day and opportunities for reflection are few. Prospective teachers generally have limited exposure to classrooms before they begin student teaching, and teacher trainers tend to have limited time to spend in classes with them, observing and critiquing their work.
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From page 229... ...
A multimedia database of video clips of expert teachers using a range of instructional and classroom management strategies has been established by Indiana University and the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (Duffy, 19971. Each lesson comes with such materials as the teacher's lesson plan, commentary by outside experts, and related research articles.
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From page 230... ...
The software publishing industry, learning experts, and education policy planners, in partnership, need to take on the challenge of exploiting the promise of computer-based technologies for improving learning. Much remains to be learned about using technology's potential: to make this happen, learning research will need to become the constant companion of software development.
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