High-tech hustle - how the introduction of various technologies has not always helped public school students - The Schools: Four Reports

National Review, Sept 20, 1993 by Edward L. Lederman

|Every Class Needs Computer, Jeffco Panel Says," read a Rocky Mountain News headline. Coast to coast the latest fad in public-education "reform" is technology - mostly computers, but also fiber optics and video multi-media hardware. No grant proposal, no model-school outline sees the light of day without detailing how it approach will replace the teacher's desk with "an Electronic Teaching Center"; "make extensive use of computers, databases, and networks"; reduce staff costs by "reconfiguring how teachers are used in the classroom"; or use "computer, multi-media, and interactive video technologies in virtually every activity students undertake."

The use of new technologies in education breaks down into three distinct areas: 1) information retrieval and communication; 2) the teaching of mathematical and scientific concepts; and 3) the enhancement of the teaching and learning process in general - e.g., IBM's Writing to Read program for children in the early grades.

The first of these has far and away the greatest advantages and the fewest drawbacks. Computers with modems make the catalogues of libraries - locally and nationwide - instantly accessible. Shorter works, such as magazine articles or encyclopedia entries, can be obtained directly without straying from one's PC. On the communication side of this field, there are programs like "Star Schools," promoted by Diane Ravitch, assistant secretary for research in the Bush Administration's Education Department. Star Schools use interactive television and computers to enable students in remote parts of the country to take classes that would otherwise have been unavailable to them. Eve Bether, a spokesman in the Bush Education Department, noted that "one student attending a school in Texas with only ten students per class was able to do all his physics preparation via Star Schools. Now he is at MIT." Sort of like the short-wave radio schools of the Australian outback.

The price tag for such technologies is relatively small ($18.4 million for Star Schools), and, more important, they don't intrude where they're not wanted. The information can be accessed, or not; the remote classrooms can carry on, or not.

More problematic is the use of computers in high-school science and math courses. Like hand-held calculators twenty years ago, computers in the classroom can permit more material to be covered by speeding up the routine calculations. But like them too, computers can obscure the fact that the students are not learning the necessary concepts. Among university science and engineering professors, the complaint of Frank Barnes, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Colorado University, Boulder, is typical: "Kids nowadays know a lot more facts because a lot more facts are thrown at them; but what you are looking for is the ability to take what knowledge you have and solve problems with it. If I put an algebra problem on the blackboard I don't want to have to explain how to solve it. I want to use it to go ahead and explain the course I am teaching. And it is in this area that I get most upset with the preparation of the students coming in."

Stanford mathematician Brad Osgood points to another problem: the misfit between the technology and the use to which it is put. "While [technology] can play a natural and an important role in calculus courses, right now it is impossible and wrong-headed to try to wedge a computer into the traditional courses, the way they have been traditionally taught. In calculus the critical preliminary issues are curricular in nature and have been with us a while. They involve the relative emphasis to be placed on calculation versus problem solving, and other related debates. Once you decide where you are going with those, then the technology should be adapted to the course, not the other way around."

Which Literacy?

But what about the "fourth basic skill" heralded in the Nation at Risk report - "computer literacy"? As it happens, none of the professors I interviewed complained that their students lacked computer literacy. Many complained about the absence of other literacies. Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, points out that computer literacy depends on some previous basic skills: spelling, simple math, and - of surprising importance - the ability to type.

Interestingly, Lewis has found there is no advantage, even for potential computer-science majors, in studying computer programming in high school: "The field changes quickly, and it is hard for high schools to have up-to-date curricula in this area. It is something, in general, that makes more sense to leave to college-level teaching. The most important training for people to have in order to study computer science is mathematics, which we are sorely lacking generally in high-school education."

As to the third use of computers in the classroom - for the general instruction of young children - precious little research on their effectiveness has been done, and what little there is suggests caution. Recent evaluations of IBM's Writing to Read program, for example, show it to be both more costly and less effective than traditional instruction. Ah, but there is the ineffable "sizzle" of the machine - the ease of electronic synapse; the excitement of a seven-year-old seeing his words on the screen, instantly, effortlessly.