Research

The latest findings from experts in the field related to the future of learning.

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May 2, 2012 | 9:00 AM | By

New Survey: Half of Teachers Use Digital Games in Class

Flickr: Flickingerbrad

No longer relegated to experimental programs, digital games are becoming much more commonly used in classrooms across the country, according to a survey by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released today.

Half of the 505 K-8 teachers surveyed said they use digital games with their students two or more days a week, and 18 percent use them daily.

There will be further, more in-depth coverage of this report in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, some more statistics from the study:

  • Nearly 70 percent said that “lower-performing students engage more with subject content with use of digital games.”
  • Three-fifths reported “increased attention to specific tasks and improved collaborations among all students.”
  • Sixty percent said using digital games “helps personalize instruction and better assess student knowledge and learning.”
  • Though most use Apple or PC computers, 25 percent said their students use iPads or tablet computers, and less than 10 percent use other mobile devices or video game consoles.
  • 62% said games make it easier to level lessons and effectively teach the range of learners in Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, Tech Tools, Games, Joan Ganz Cooney Center
April 17, 2012 | 10:00 AM | By

When Technologies Collide: Consumer, K-12 and Higher Ed

Flickr: Orange Fred

By Frank Catalano

Schools have been adopting iPads with lightning speed  — more than 1.5 million have already been distributed to students, a mere two years after the original iPad launch. But beyond Apple’s influence in education, the high-profile tablet appears to be the poster child for a different trend.

Call it the consumerization of education technology.

What the iPad’s rapid incursion into the classroom masks is that the walls that used to slow new instructional technology’s adoption in education are falling. And when walls fall, what’s inside can spill out in any one of several directions.

A lot of teachers, administrators and even education policy makers carry the same tech expectations as their students.

A decade ago, the standard education technology adoption cycle was pretty straightforward. Cool tech was traditionally seeded in the consumer market. If the technology could be useful enough for teaching, it might be adopted in higher education where older students and their parents were the consumers. Then, after being thoroughly vetted and validated, it might eventually work its way down into K-12 classrooms where schools and districts bought the technology.

It was a long process, one that itself might take a decade — and for good reasons.

First, relative to today, technology was expensive – in 2002, a laptop with 512MB RAM, a 30GB hard drive and 15” screen running Windows XP or Mac OS X, sporting a not-so-fast 802.11b Wi-Fi connection and modem, cost about $3,000. For the most part, with the exception of these heavy laptops and some not-so-smart phones, mobile technologies were relatively unfamiliar in education.

Internet infrastructure was also a challenge. If any Web connections were prevalent in schools, they were rarely wireless. It really hasn’t been so long since NetDay, a grassroots volunteer effort, physically wired 75,000 classrooms for Internet access in 40 states between 1996 and 2001.

Yet the old evaluation cycle would work, haltingly. Online classes and distance learning began in higher education, as did digital textbooks, before filtering though the adoption strata into K-12 Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Tech Tools, iPad, Mobile Learning, Technology in Schools
April 10, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

Is Learning Facts a Trivial Pursuit?

Flickr: JKing89

By Tasha Bergson-Michelson

Dear Savvy Searcher,

You wrote recently about the importance of teaching search skills. What do you make of the whole idea that kids no longer need to learn facts because they can find answers so easily online? Do you think that is true?

Concerned Teacher

When I was growing up, we used to say that you don’t need to know everything, just know how to find it. I firmly believe the same today, but I now appreciate that an integral part of search literacy is knowing enough background information to make informed decisions about what sources to believe. The ability to evaluate sources is one of the linchpin skills students need for navigating research both online and off.

As I argued in my last post, research skills can’t be taught in a single lesson, but must be cultivated slowly, over time. There are many technical skills that students should develop to learn more about a source. But no matter how well we can analyze web addresses, research authors, or uncover who owns a website, the most fundamental skill we have for judging a source is what Ernest Hemingway called our “built-in automatic crap detector.” What fuels this “crap detector,” if not a collection of learned facts?

In the lingering spirit of April Fools’ Day, consider the famous hoax Web site, Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. Now, I am not particularly enamored of using hoax sites to teach evaluation. Identifying a popular hoax is a whole lot easier than dealing with the more subtle types of misinformation students need to learn to avoid. However, the tree octopus site is well-constructed, and we can use it to practice reflecting on how common sense and background knowledge combine to set off the crap detector. After all, many students have seen or heard about some octopus in the past, and have the ability to surmise that one probably does not live in a tree. My experience is that most students encountering the tree octopus for the first time say, “That’s weird!” giving a great opening for discussion about how when common sense alarms go off, it is good to dig further.

Such a lesson can be both fun and empowering. The message is not, “There is so much misinformation out there and you have been wrongly believing it all,” but rather, “You already Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, critical thinking, search
April 5, 2012 | 12:15 PM | By

What Kids Should Know About Their Own Brains

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Neuroscience may seem like an advanced subject of study, perhaps best reserved for college or even graduate school. Two researchers from Temple University in Philadelphia propose that it be taught earlier, however—much earlier. As in first grade.

In a study published in this month’s issue of the journal Early Education and Development, psychologists Peter Marshall and Christina Comalli began by surveying children aged four to 13 to discover what they already knew about the brain. Previous research had found that elementary school pupils typically have a limited understanding of the brain and how it functions, believing it to be something like “a container for storing memories and facts.”

Marshall and Comalli’s questionnaire turned up the same uncertain grasp of the topic, which the researchers attributed to several factors. First, while parents and teachers talk often with young children about parts of the body and how they work, they rarely mention this most important organ. (A 2005 study by another group of scientists found that young children hear very few instances of the word brain in everyday conversation.) Secondly, children can’t observe their own brains, and so are left to guess about what’s going on inside their heads—not unlike the state of ignorance in which adults dwelled for many centuries before the founding of neuroscience as a scientific discipline. And finally, most students aren’t formally taught much about the brain until at least middle school. Marshall and Comalli believe such instruction can and should begin much sooner.

A 20-minute lesson about the brain was enough to improve knowledge of brain functioning.

To that end, they designed a 20-minute lesson about the brain and delivered it to a group of first-grade students. Even this brief intervention, the psychologists report, “was enough to improve their knowledge of brain functioning as assessed three weeks later”; a control group of first graders, taught for 20 minutes about honeybees, showed no such improvement. Marshall and Comalli’s neuroscience lesson was especially focused on teaching children about the role of the brain in sensory activities—that the brain is not just “for thinking,” as many kids assume, but also for seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, learning styles, Neuroscience
March 30, 2012 | 11:05 AM | By

Amidst a Mobile Revolution in Schools, Will Old Teaching Tactics Work?

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Just a few years ago, the idea of using a mobile phone as a legitimate learning tool in school seemed far-fetched, if not downright blasphemous. Kids were either prohibited from bringing their phones to school, or at the very least told to shut it off during school hours.

But these days, it’s not unusual to hear a teacher say, “Class, turn on your cell. It’s time to work.”

Harvard professor Chris Dede has been working in the field of education technology for decades, and is astonished at how quickly mobile devices are penetrating in schools. “I’ve never seen technology moving faster than mobile learning,” said Dede, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

That’s not necessarily surprising, given that a staggering 80 percent of teens have cell phones. This penetration of mobile devices in the consumer market has also wrought what Dede describes as a “sea change” in the education landscape.

“People are talking about this being an inflection point,” said Elliot Soloway. Soloway is a professor at the School of Education at the University of Michigan, and a longtime proponent of mobile learning. “It feels like something major is about to happen. It went from a silly idea, to, ‘Of course it’s inevitable.”

“I’m petrified that we’ll apply new technology to old pedagogy.”

The most recent data available is from 2010, and indicates that 62 percent of schools allow cell phones to be used on school grounds, though not in classrooms. But both Dede and Solloway, who are closely involved in coaching schools on how to use mobile learning techniques, said a lot of progress has been made in just the past couple of years.

“What I’m hearing from schools more is that they’ve eliminated policies restricting using mobile devices for learning and they’re interested in developing mobile learning programs as fast as possible,” Dede said. “We’re going from districts fearing it and blocking it off to welcoming it and making it a major part of their technology plan. We’ll be surprised if a significant portion of districts aren’t using mobile learning inside and outside of schools soon.”

More than 1.5 million iPads have been deployed in schools. That’s not counting school-supplied non-Apple devices, or the most ubiquitous device of all — students’ own mobile phones.

Classroom uses for iPads and cell phones are vast and varied. Some schools are replacing print books for apps that feature videos and interactive quizzes. Kindergarteners are Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Tech Tools, bring your own device, Mobile Learning, personalized learning
March 23, 2012 | 11:25 AM | By

What Do Kids Know About Online Privacy? More Than You Think

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Much of the anxiety around tweens and social media lies in the fear that they don’t care about or understand privacy settings. Parents worry that kids will either willingly or unintentionally expose themselves to dangerous anonymous predators, or that they don’t fully understand that the information they share about themselves can be used against them.

But tweens are much more savvy about their privacy settings than adults give them credit for, even when it comes to subtleties of “frenemies” dynamics, according to a small, qualitative study by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that’s forthcoming in the journal Learning, Media, & Technology.

“Tweens value privacy, seek privacy from both strangers and known others online, and use a variety of strategies to protect their privacy online,” write researchers Katie Davis and Carrie James, who conducted in-depth interviews with 42 middle-school students for the study. “Tweens’ online privacy concerns are considerably broader than the ‘stranger danger’ messages they report hearing from teachers.”

“Their willingness to share does not mean that they care little for privacy.”

Most kids are well aware of risks, and make “fairly sophisticated” decisions about privacy settings based on advice and information from their parents, teachers, and friends. They differentiate between people they don’t know out in the world (distant strangers) and those they don’t know in the community, such as high school students in their hometown (near strangers). Marisa, for example, a 10-year old interviewed in the study (who technically is not allowed to use Facebook), “enjoys participating in virtual worlds and using instant messenger and Facebook to socialize with her friends — and is keenly aware of the risks — especially those related to privacy.” She’s doesn’t share highly sensitive personal information on her Facebook profile and actively blocks certain people.

“A growing body of research suggests that while teens share a great deal online, their willingness to share does not mean that they care little for privacy,” the authors write. In fact, they’re well Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research