Developing the ICT Capable School

Steve Kennewell, John Parkinson, Howard Tanner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138472396
• eBook ISBN: 9781134564729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book helps readers to improve the development of ICT capability through understanding the factors at work in whole school contexts. Based on research that examined schools' approaches to the development of pupils' ICT capability and identified the factors which lead to success, it provides practical advice, but with clear justifications in terms of well-researched principles and illustrations. It covers issues specific to both primary and secondary phases of education together with a range of common concerns and will be of use to practitioners and school staff involved in planning and delivering ICT training. This title will therefore provide readers with: Greater understanding or personal ICT capability Knowledge of effective management, teaching methods and co-ordination strategies for ICT Understanding of the importance of a whole school approach

1 The context for ICT capability in schools

Policy, research and practice

In this chapter, we first set out the general context of education policy and practice in relation to ICT in UK schools. We then describe the nature of the research project which led to the writing of this book, and explain how the project characterised success in developing ICT capability.

The background to ICT capability in schools

Over the last thirty years, it has been argued regularly that the introduction of computers and information technology into schools would lead to developments and changes in the world of education as least as dramatic as the impact which had occurred in the world of work. For the last twenty years, the UK has been in the vanguard of the technological revolution in educational computing, but few would argue that the early utopian claims have been realised. Rather, most commentators agree that the computer has failed to permeate effectively into the school setting: ‘The UK has a higher ratio of computers per schoolchild than almost any other country, including the US. Yet despite this lead and the fact that Information Technology has been on the agenda for almost thirty years, it is not clear that IT has made a significant impact on educational standards . . .’ (Lovegrove and Wilshire 1997: 1). In recent years, computers have become a familiar feature of many UK homes and 5 million home computers were purchased between 1989 and 1997 representing 22 per cent of UK households (Lovegrove and Wilshire 1997: 1–2). This represents a significant foundation of technology from which to build.

On the other hand school provision varies widely. A high proportion of obsolete hardware is still in use in the classroom, with the result that children often meet industry standard hardware and software at home rather than in school. Usage in school is also very variable, and while in some schools computers are frequently used as teaching tools, in others they are hardly used at all (ibid.).

Pupils rarely use ICT in core areas of the curriculum such as mathematics and science (Cox 1997; Harris 1999), and the number of teachers in secondary schools using computers in their teaching has remained stubbornly constant ‘at about 32 per cent’ in recent years, suggesting that one of the most costly resources in these schools is being significantly under-utilised (Harris 1999). Primary schools appear to demonstrate greater curricular use of ICT, with 65 per cent of teachers feeling confident about this, but few primary schools make substantial use of ICT in teaching subjects other than English (DfEE 1998a). Word-processing and desktop publishing still predominate.

The relative failure of initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s to effect significant change in educational practice should not, perhaps, be all that surprising. Early developments in the 1980s consisted of industry-driven initiatives (Wellington 1989) which provided hardware for schools with very little support for teachers on how it might be used. The inclusion of ICT in the National Curriculum was something of an afterthought (DES–Welsh Office 1988), and the initial Orders (DES–Welsh Office 1990) placed ICT alongside design & technology as part of an umbrella subject called technology. These approaches may have placed too much emphasis on hardware provision and the development of abstract value-free skills. The aims of vocational education and the anticipated needs of industry, rather than the development of pedagogy, dominated the curriculum.

The Dearing review (1993) of the National Curriculum gave ICT the status of a subject in its own right, yet also placed it ‘at the heart of the curriculum’ as a cross-curricular skill. The subsequent (1995) National Curriculum orders required that pupils should be given opportunities to develop and apply their ICT capability in each subject. However, this conflicted with the subject culture of the National Curriculum. Given that many teachers were not convinced about the value of ICT for the teaching of their subjects and were being expected to pass on skills and knowledge which they did not have themselves, the failure to achieve the utopian vision is not surprising (Tanner 1992; Strack 1995).

During the last thirty years there has been a lack of clarity over the educational objectives for ICT, and this has exacerbated problems because of shortages of equipment and a lack of training for teachers (Tanner 1992; Strack 1995). As Lovegrove and Wilshire (1997: 3) have put it: ‘We need to be clearer about what we want children to learn and whether learning should be about acquiring vocational skills or about learning for its own sake.’

Faith in the potential of ICT to improve standards in education resulted in the UK government’s National Grid for Learning (NGfL) initiative. In an attempt to avoid repeating earlier mistakes, significant expenditure was also allocated for the in-service training (INSET) of teachers through New Opportunities Funding, and the ability to use ICT in subject teaching became a pre-requisite for ‘qualified teacher’ status.

The 1999 statistical release (DfEE 1999a) reported that schools themselves had spent large amounts (on average) on ICT resources, and the pupil–computer ratio had reached 18 :1 in primary schools and 9 :1 in secondary schools. Significantly, headteachers and subject heads indicated that 90 per cent of primary staff and 85 per cent of secondary staff reported having had some training in the use of ICT, and claimed that 65 per cent of primary staff and 61 per cent of secondary staff felt confident with the use of ICT in the curriculum. In the first part of the year 2000 we may be approaching the point at which a critical mass of technological resources exists in combination with appropriately trained teachers, so that it will be possible to begin to effect the changes predicted at the start of the 1980s.

However, politicians and perhaps some teachers appear too ready to believe that computers in the classroom are inherently a good thing and to accept skill-based notions of ICT capability uncritically: ‘Our recommendation to Central Government is that they must make the act of faith and encourage the education sector to start using technology rather than talking about it!’ (Stevenson 1997: 6).

ICT as a National Curriculum subject and as a tool for learning

It is strange that, of all the important assumptions behind the National Curriculum and the structure of knowledge implied within it, the notion of IT capability set out in the original National Curriculum orders (DES–WO 1990) is one of the least criticised (notwithstanding Birnbaum 1989 and 1990). The main problem which has been highlighted in the past is the difficulty which many teachers have in understanding the ideas represented, because IT capability is written about at such a high level of generality (Murray 1992). The notion of capability itself, however, has not been challenged. The lack of clarity in objectives continues as the subject is renamed ICT in the new National Curriculum. Unless we clarify our objectives we are unlikely to arrive where we expect.

In the National Curriculum for Wales, however, the subject is to be called IT but the resources referred to as ICT (ACCAC 1999a). The distinction is unclear to many teachers and headteachers, however, and at the level of classroom interaction both subject and resources are certainly interdependent for activity and learning. We will use the term ICT to cover both the subject and the resources from now on, but there are three aspects of ICT which need to be distinguished.

1. There are the generic attitudes, beliefs, processes and strategies associated with the IT Key Skill. Key skills underpin learning in a range of subject areas within the National Curriculum and are generally learned on the way to learning something else. When key skills are learned in the context of another subject discipline it is likely that they will be learned in a form which is useful and useable within that discipline. Any definition of ICT capability should include within it a demand that pupils are able to employ technology appropriately in learning, employment and everyday life situations. It is this use of the knowledge, skills and understanding of the technology outside its own subject discipline which is being grasped at by the National Curriculum’s authors through the term ICT. ICT capability is a useful term in this context in that it implies a capacity or power to act in as yet undefined situations, defining itself through its potential for application.
2. The IT Key Skill is associated with a discipline which can and should be seen as a subject area in its own right. However, ICT knowledge is different in significant respects from the formal knowledge required in the more traditional academic disciplines. Although there are low-level basic skills, routines and techniques that may appear to be at the heart of its subject content, progression within ICT requires understanding at a deeper level to facilitate the development of strategies and processes, to identify opportunities, solve problems and evaluate solutions. These higher level objectives require far more than a basic skills’ approach. Knowledge which is skill- and technique-based rather than concept-based tends to be specific to the context and the resources, making it difficult for students to transfer their skills to new situations (Blackmore et al. 1992: 252). Without an emphasis on understanding concepts, the use of computers in schools will always be limited (Herschbach 1995: 1). Conceptual understanding in ICT refers to the schemata or mental models which students develop about computer systems. The degree of abstraction characteristic of such mental models relates to the extent to which they could be applied to a range of differing ICT systems. There is evidence that abstract mental models support the transfer of knowledge and understanding, and thus underlie ICT capability (Twining 1995).
3. ICT may be viewed as a resource which can be used to support and extend pedagogy across the curriculum. The Industrial Revolution transformed society through its amplification of the power of the human muscle. The claim that ICT will revolutionise education through the amplification and emancipation of the human mind (Howe 1983) has yet to be demonstrated.

From ICT’s first introduction into schools, claims have been made for its potential to facilitate the learning of other subjects and even for the development of students’ thinking (see e.g.: Papert 1980; Pea 1985). It was thought that students who learned the programming language Logo would learn to think like a computer. They would immerse themselves in a mathematically rich environment and thus learn mathematics in a more natural and effective way (Papert 1980). Students programming computers were expected to reorganise and strengthen their own thinking (Pea 1985). Thus just by using a computer, albeit in a programming mode, learning would be improved. The pedagogy demanded by Papert and others who made claims for the power of programming to improve thinking was exploratory and individualistic, which then, as now, was very much against the dominant form prevailing in schools. Sadly, hard evidence for the development and transfer of such thinking skills has not emerged.

We may see tool software such as word-processors, spreadsheets, databases or graph plotters as adaptable tools of great utility. When students apply such tools to problems arising naturally in the contexts of other disciplines, they may develop ICT capability, although that might not have been the intention of the teacher or student in selecting the tool. The power of such tools lies in their ability to perform routine repetitive operations swiftly and accurately and allow the adjustment of variables in an exploratory fashion. This provides an opportunity to emancipate the mind from routine tasks, amplifying its power and allowing it to work at higher levels. For example, even young pupils producing a report about the school garden can quickly change the words and images used in order to cater for different audiences, such as pupils and parents. In developing the document, they can switch their focus between choice of words, images, sentence structure, syntax, and visual effect without having to rewrite the text each time. An older pupil using a spreadsheet to explore the effect of changing gradient and intercept in straight-line graphs is enabled to plot large numbers of lines quickly and accurately in order to make and test hypotheses. The pupil is thus enabled and encouraged to focus on the higher level mathematical processes rather than the mechanical skills of graph plotting.

The use of technology as a resource to support pedagogy across the curriculum may often provide opportunities for the development of pupils’ ICT capability, but this need not always be the case. On the other hand, teachers may demonstrate their own ICT capability through the appropriate use of technology in their teaching.

There is a double bind here. If in a mathematics lesson pupils find difficulty in learning to use the graph-plotting software, the intended advantage of using a computer can be lost as the software becomes the focus of attention rather than the mathematics. The greatest advantage in subject learning may occur when the ICT used is familiar and routine. The standards of achievement (NCET–NAACE 1995) warn inspectors to distinguish between situations in which relatively low-level ICT skills are being used to support higher achievement in a subject and those where the main purpose is to develop mastery of ICT tools and their use. If you are a head of a secondary subject department or a primary subject co-ordinator, you will be focusing on targets for raising test and examination performance in your subject, and you are likely to be far more enthusiastic about the subject achievement than about the ICT capability.

Computer-aided learning using subject-specific software is usually based on a similar pedagogy to the old programmed-learning courses which proved to be such a dismal failure in the 1960s. For example, much attention is currently focused on a number of integrated learning systems (ILS) which are claimed to be useful in teaching numeracy and literacy. These systems tend to take a serial, atomistic view of learning based on an attempt to predict all possible misconceptions linked to particular incorrect responses. They emphasise facts, right answers and correct methods, ignoring intuition and stifling imagination. In contrast, the National Numeracy Strategy (DfEE 1999b) respects students’ idiosyncratic methods. The two approaches appear to be mutually exclusive. Although it is not yet clear whether resources such as ILS develop subject learning effectively (BECTA 1999), they are unlikely to contribute positively to the development of ICT capability because of their highly directive nature.

ICT in the National Curriculum places emphasis on the development of a range of tools and techniques that can be used effectively

to explore, analyse, exchange and present information and to support their problem solving, investigative and expressive work . . . being discriminating about information and the ways in which it may be used and making informed judgement...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: The context for ICT capability in schools
• 2: Developing ICT capability
• 3: The role of senior management
• 4: Co-ordinating ICT
• 5: ICT in the primary classroom
• 6: ICT in the secondary classroom
• 7: The ICT specialist
• 8: Pupils’ perspectives on ICT education
• 9: Sharing perspectives across the phases of schooling
• 10: The ICT-capable school
• Bibliography