I just finished reading the two online articles for the first week in class. I'm struggled with the Waxman meta-analysis of the Effectiveness of Teaching and Learning with Technology on Student Outcomes. I think there were a few reasons for why I did not connect with this article. The first is the statistical analysis. I took stats, once, in college and now it is gone. I was really bogged down and put off by the jargon of statistical analysis. What I did get out of all the statistical discussion is, despite the fact that we are supposed to be having this data driven system with NCLB, there are still very few studies done in the area of education and technology's impact upon it. Also the studies that are done are often not set up or operated with statistical integrity. This does not surprise me very much given my colleagues response whenever a piece of educational research may be put in front of us. Normally it is disdain and frustration that comes out of the fact that the place and conditions of the research projects so often don't look or feel anything like the place and conditions of where we work.
The second part of this article that I was frustrated by was the admission of the wild inconsistencies of the articles they included in their meta-analysis. I was shocked to see that studies that were conducted in the 90's were being included just because the findings had been published in the last five years. Given what the average person knows about the rate of change in the world of technology it seems criminal to include studies from approximately 15 years ago.
The main finding was pretty obvious, that integrating technology will result in a positive correlation with outcome results. I was not really surprised to see this. I was also not very surprised to see that by integrating technology the dynamic in the classroom changed from a teacher led to a teacher moderated classroom. I think this is the appropriate way to manage the class setting and allows students more freedom to follow their interests and to form more natural collaborative units. Of course this structure of student independence does lead to more abuse of privelege by students who aren't capable or comfortable with the freedom and you will see the increase in behavioral issues that were found in the study.
Overall, I wasn't that impressed by the study. I felt it was an overly technical reading for my tastes and it admitted to too many serious flaws. I also felt like the conclusions were pretty obvious from my experiences and I'm guessing most of us in this class would have ended in pretty much the same area based simply on our daily classes.
Jason,
ReplyDeleteYou were not alone in your struggles with the second reading. My issue is also with the outdated information and the fact that analysis was made based on what others had done. If a firsthand study was made, perhaps by modeling other studies, I think the results could have been more useful. There are too many variables when using someone else's data.
I am glad to see there is a correlation between a technology rich classroom and positive achievement results. To me, the next step would be to develop a curriculum that allows for the quickly changing technological landscape, and to match these resources to what we do in the classroom. I think there will be a clash of ideas where that is concerned. Many older teachers will not change what they do in order to use the new technologies. They simply go to the filing cabinet and grab what they have used for the last thirty years. That is not a knock against them, for that is how I learned, and I think I turned out fairly competent. :) That being said, technology will improve student achievement, but we need to conduct our own studies to see what works in our individual classrooms.
I have to agree with Ryan on this one as well in stating that you were certainly not alone in your disdain for this reading. I too found it to be like pulling teeth or nails on a chalk board or whatever other negative conotations you can derive. I too am glad that you stated that most of the other teachers could have come to the same conclussion because that means that I'm not alone in my belief that the utilization of our own knowledge is more important and just as effective if not more than that of this statistical data. Looking forward to working with you in the upcoming weeks.
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