ICT for Curriculum Enhancement

Moira Monteith

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781841508962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book considers the cognitive nature of courses connected with ICT or using ICT as an integral part of the course, including some views on the associated learning and teaching styles. Which factors lead to learning outcomes and are these intended or fortuitous? Factors may include ones specific to particular subject areas and their relationship with ICT, motivation associated with ICT usage, the interest which teachers, pupils and students who enjoy using ICT bring to the learning context. Recent developments in the use of ICT, particularly in an educational context where us of ICT has become one of the learning strategies in the portfolio of options teachers possess, have meant that the pedagogic usage has become more important generally. The focus of this book is on the curricular use of ICT and so course evaluation and design are the main contents of each chapter. In this sense the curriculum becomes the cognitive site of learning. Most other books look at specific pedagogic uses rather than the debate between subject and skill learning. Also, a government research paper indicates that thinking skills may well become the new focus for the next phase of development.

Remodelling Education

Moira Monteith

The concept of flux has existed ever since Heraclitus put his leg into a river in 513 BC to show people how things keep changing. ‘Management of change’ in education has been discussed perhaps for three or four decades. Recent research papers and government initiatives, particularly those concerned with the use of ICT, pelt us with facts on the inevitability of change. Undoubtedly ICT brings changes, some expected, others quite unexpected. This chapter suggests ways of using IT to help us understand what is happening within our classrooms, to gain knowledge of ourselves and our teaching.

Modelling is a learning strategy included within National Curriculum guidelines and considered conceptually useful in terms of planning, deciding which techniques to use in problem solving, and developing new designs and ways of looking at past events. Oldknow and Taylor (1998) propose two definitions: ‘the development of a hypothesis to explain the connection between variables in a system … in a vaguer sense the word “modelling” is used synonymously with “What if..?”’ I suggest modelling may provide a useful strategy for looking at our own practices in teaching and learning. In particular, our behaviour with ICT reflects our practices, both in the use of ICT and whatever else we do in education.

Oldknow and Taylor’s definition above indicates that we might be dealing with one or several hypotheses to explain the connection between variables. However, many computer-based models are in fact the hypothesis stage and suggest what might happen with a given set of variables, perhaps sequentially changing the variables. Such models achieved public prominence in the UK during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth infections in livestock. Various outcomes were plotted and results shown on national TV newscasts. One particular model which involved the quick slaughter of herds diagnosed as infected, appeared to have a considerable effect in terms of how the outbreak was dealt with. Since speed was one of the important factors in this model, suspect animals were slaughtered as quickly as possible, some animals before subsequent tests proved the diagnosis to be mistaken. Similarly, within most models, certain features will become foregrounded and their prominence can skew what happens when we attempt to replicate the model in a slightly different context.

The model previously cited, concerning the foot-and-mouth epidemic, implied quick action. Some models seem comparatively static, particularly if they are considered the ‘ideal’. In Victorian schools, children had ‘model’ lessons describing, for example, exotic animals when a model of the animal would be shown to the class. In a Derbyshire village school the inspectors of the day found fault with a school’s resources: there were insufficient models to give children opportunities to understand the world outside their county. The governors clubbed together and between them bought a few more models, including one of a whale. In a school with no TV, few photographs and not many books it must have been difficult for children to imagine what whales are like. The model in this case remained the same for succeeding intakes of children over many years, enabling the children to widen their knowledge of the earth and its creatures. However, it was only one model of one kind of whale. A prescriptive model often implies a static viewpoint. The National Curriculum cannot be the same in all the contexts of all the schools there are in England but we have endeavoured to make it so. There are signs, however, that this policy is changing and schools will be able to look at curricula in a more independent manner, developing a number of different curricular models.

Information technology and history

Using different variables we can plot the past in a range of models. We do not need to alter facts as Orwell suggested might happen in his novel 1984. We merely foreground one or more specific features in which we are interested. Simplistic but fascinating. Early accounts of history were modelled on the life and death of various kings and queens. Economic history, on the other hand, considers factors other than just the sovereign’s life and his/her management skills. If we examine history from the point of view of where information came from and who knew what about its flow (Rodriguez and Ferrante, 1996), then we end up with a rather different view of what was and might be happening.

In agrarian societies, information tends to come from the top heirarchically, and is passed down through social layers. Knowledge held by those at the bottom of the social pyramid, though essential for their survival, perhaps about which herbs to eat, how to cultivate certain foodstuffs, was often neglected in the past by those at higher social levels, sometimes to their cost. Usually there are few past records of what people at the bottom of the social pyramid did know.

Social layers change when industrialisation occurs within a country. The people with new knowledge are those who understand how to run and maintain factories, mills, mines and other industries. Managers become important, receiving information from above, passing it down and training people to work in new ways. Still the information flow remains predominantly one way and problems experienced by people at the bottom are never realised or even known by those at the top. Strikes and withdrawal of labour occur, even riots and rebellions, situations which might have been avoided had their employers and governments understood what was happening.

Currently, we are living in what is claimed to be an Information Age, where information is deemed pre-eminently important. Middle management has lost some of its power since top social layers can communicate more easily with those way beneath. Consequently, there are fewer layers to the now flatter social pyramid. Those without appropriate information can fall outside the model altogether and become a new version of underclass. Sovereigns no longer seem very important as such, and even those people apparently running multi-national companies are only as good as their information. Consumer groups can wield power through the knowledge they have gained of certain products or results from certain industrial processes and, by disseminating this information, they can alter the sales (and thus the processes) of the industries concerned. Within such a world view, information is king.

We can discuss at length the differences between information, knowledge and wisdom and clearly they are different. There is no doubt, however, that appropriate information and intelligence of what is happening are extremely important in social, educational and employment terms. The direction of the information flow is also significant. Global information may have made the world seem a smaller place but if governments don’t know how their country is perceived by others, or how certain of their actions are applauded or disliked a chink is opened in their defences. The problem in government and management terms seems to be that the governors and managers can dictate only the information they send out. They are still left with a gap in their knowledge if they don’t collect all possible information, including the needs and knowledge of those people at the bottom of the heaps. The term we currently use, ‘information technology’, first appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1958. In half a century the collection and storage of information has become one of the main preoccupations of all major governments.

Foregrounding ICT in education

If we run a model of educational development foregrounding ICT, the major effects so far have occurred outside the classroom. These have been concerned with the implementation of ICT in school administration and the collection of information about our education system. Government-run databases contain a wide range of details about schools, from pupils’ average reading ages, to the provision of curricula on ‘personal health and social education’, and details about staff and school buildings. Some schools, parents and/or governors have claimed that specific data has been incorrect because the questions asked were insufficiently contextualised. Many of these criticisms have been heeded so that more subtly worded questions were developed and sophisticated analyses directed. A very recent OFSTED report gives an example of this: ‘At the end of Year 9 in tests in English, mathematics and science, the results in 2000 were well below average compared with those for all schools, though broadly average when compared with results in schools with similar intakes.’ A similar statement is made about Year 11 students as well as a statement about the attainment of students when they come into the school at the age of eleven. Just to make those statements alone requires effective national databases plus the requirement of all schools to make results available and, indeed, to help with the collection of requisite data.

Similarly, in a survey by BECTa on the relationship between ICT and primary school standards, October 2000, p14:

The correlation between ICT resource grade and the summative grade given for pupil attainment at Key Stage 2 was calculated, based on the sample of all junior schools[ie those inspected].The correlation was found to be 0.07. This is statistically significant (that is, we can be confident that it is not simply the result of chance sampling variation).

This indicator led to a statement:

Key Finding: The better the ICT rating of a Primary School, the more likely it is to be amongst above-average schools for all core national tests at Key Stage 2. Statistically, there is a significant positive correlation between the schools’ Ofsted ICT resource grade and their grade for overall Key Stage 2 attainment. This trend is consistant across all core subject areas.

This publication of data, A preliminary report for the DfEE on the relationship between ICT and primary school standards – an analysis of Ofsted inspection data for 1998 – 9, (BECTa 2000) includes a methodology section, so that readers and researchers may interpret the results more effectively and know exactly how the figures were arrived at. These details indicate both the strengths and the weakness of such models. It certainly looks as if we should regard favourably schools with satisfactory (or above) ICT facilities. However, we must remember that we are looking at one factor only (in this case ICT) and the social organism which is the school must certainly have far more subtle workings than the relationship between ICT resources and school test results.

The use of computers and other allied technology has helped considerably in successive governments’ centralisation of the curriculum, both in collecting information and delivering printed curricular materials. Examination results have been available to governments for many years; but in the past, for example in the 1950s, the majority of pupils did not appear on these results because they never took any public exams after the age of eleven. (The exam popularly known as the eleven-plus which decided in the main whether or not a child went on to a grammar school). Trawls for information these days can include all schools, with a view that some data at least will be used comparatively.

Data used comparatively can of course lead to outcomes such as ‘League Tables’ of school results. The schools at the bottom of the list are probably selected for that position through a number of variables, some of which the school may not control. For example, if we take into consideration the statistical finding that boys tend to achieve less well in terms of their literacy development than girls it should come as no surprise that schools which have more boys as pupils than girls are more likely to fail an OFSTED inspection. An analysis of several hundred OFSTED inspection reports revealed that schools where there were 10% more boys than girls were more likely to be put on the failing list. Chief Inspector Mike Tomlinson stated, 3rd October, 2001: ‘We know that once the proportion of boys and girls reaches a greater than 10% difference, then you have got a problem on your hands’. The account goes on to state that the allocation of school places may be affected by this information. Now that the infrastructure for collecting educational data is in place and computers exist to run analyses we need to ensure that more complex models are developed than ‘league tables’.

Certainly, some statisticians who work in the field of education, such as Eugene Owen, (2000) at the National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, US, believe that comparable studies of schools and education systems can help all of us see what works best. We can attempt to follow that success, if we wish, by using what he calls ‘intellectual capital’, that is the knowledge gained from other educationalists’ experience. He quotes as one example evidence from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which included video study of mathematics classrooms:

Seventy-six percent of Japanese teachers reported that they meet at least once a month to discuss curriculum, compared to 60 percent of U.S. teachers and 44 percent of German teachers. Moreover, it is a regular occurrence in Japan for teachers to go into each other’s classrooms to observe or be observed. Sixty-four percent of U.S. teachers have never entered another teacher’s classroom for that purpose, and similarly, 61 percent report that they have never been observed by a peer. Even the physical structure of schools in Japan supports teacher collaboration: schools have large teacher workrooms, where each teacher has a desk nearby his or her colleagues who teach the same grade or subjects. The widely understood culture of privacy and individual entrepreneurialship in American classrooms is in stark contrast to Japan in which good ideas are expected to be “handed down” from one teacher to another.

(Owen, 2000)

It also seems likely that more international indices will be made available. The Human Development Index (www.undp.org/hdro/) already includes literacy rates as one of the indicators of development within any country and may well go on to include other educational data in the future. It currently includes the number of years children attend school in each country. None of this would have been possible without the collection, organisation and dissemination of vast amounts of electronic information.

ICT in the Classroom or The Pragmatic Model

When several initiatives come on stream at once, particularly those which are government funded, many teachers find it difficult to keep all of them going simultaneously. For example, when literacy development appeared to be the major goal, that was the goal teachers in Primary Schools aimed for. This meant that ICT, as another initiative, took a back seat. Steve Higgins and David Moseley began a project in Newcastle schools to encourage better achievement in literacy and numeracy using ICT, so they sent out a questionnaire in Autumn 1997, concerning the use schools made then of their ICT facilities. A year later, they asked for an update:

…this indicated rapid change in some areas, particularly Internet access. 37% of schools were now connected (usually one computer, probably in the office or possibly the library). More importantly, however, daily use of computers in class had declined – some of the teachers we worked with reported that this was due to the introduction of the literacy hour and what they felt was appropriate in the light of the literacy strategy guidelines.

(Higgins and Moseley, 2002)

Teachers have been extremely pragmatic and delivered results according to their estimate of what the current government department wanted. They rather naturally put their trust in tried-and-tested methods with which they felt confident rather than an area such as ICT with which they generally felt less at ease and which as everyone admits, can sometimes present practical difficulties not only in terms of equipment but also of class management.

We found that teachers provided less feedback to pupils during these 'Literacy plus ICT' lessons and carried out significantly less marking of pupils' work. It seemed that when the teacher's attention was divided, the lesson became less interactive for the whole class. In most cases the teacher acted as helper for the children using computers, typically spending half of the time available with those children. Because of this, the quality of teacher-pupil talk with the class as a whole seemed negatively affected, in that the teacher was less likely to ask pupils to expand on their answers and to engage in extended talk to develop understanding. Plenary review sessions were sometimes omitted and when they did take place, teachers asked fewer questions.

(Higgins and Moseley, 2002)

This observation indicates that teaching one subject area through a specific medium, in this case ICT, might result in the dilution of the teaching focused on that subject area. If we imagine a reverse situation, ICT taught through literacy skills, a similar result might well be the case. This should give us pause for thought. Graham Jarvis (2001) very sensibly states: ‘The first thing to realise is that confident and competent use of computers takes time to achieve.’ He goes on to say:

In the desire to make our teachers, trainees and pupils computer able and literate perhaps we have overlooked computer cognition. We are all familiar with … “starting where the learner is”. Perhaps it is a view of IT (and ICT) which would be beneficial and meet the needs of both teachers and learners. The emphasis on “skills tests” as a measure of trainee competence indicates an over-simplistic view of a complex problem….Basic computer competence may be necessary but there is a need to enthuse and break down negative attitudes as well as addressing issues of pedagogy.

Jarvis is stating a basic educational maxim, that of beginning where the learner is. His aim is ‘computer cognition,’ by which he means ‘a more fundamental knowledge and understanding of the workings of the computer and how it might be used either in its own right or as a support to teaching and learning. To begin to have knowledge and understanding of its potential.’ (Jarvis, 2002) No doubt many of us would like to debate his definition and even the term ‘computer cognition’ itself. Nevertheless, he has put into words what we are surely all aiming for. Current computer literacy or computer competence courses may be a starting point for future enthusiasts, but any learning model we employ must also build in the valuable asset of teachers’ pragmatism. ‘Enthusiasm’ and deep...