A recent article in The Gainesville Sun focuses on rewarding students for high test scores. The FCAT (i.e., the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) is used to determine whether students can advance in grade level and whether seniors can graduate. It is an enormously high stakes test in Florida.

For motivational purposes, students from one of the lowest socio-economic school zones who showed improved scores from the previous year were given 15 second turns in an inflated box filled with one and five dollar bills where a fan blew the money all around them. Students raced to grab as much money as they could.

Yes, the students were given a lesson about banking, savings and checking accounts. The school’s parent teacher association, the advisory council, and local businesses chipped in a little more than $2,000 US.The school’s principal reported that the money machine was a way of saying “good job” to the students. She also encouraged parents to invest the children’s “winnings” in a savings bond.

Similarly, a school in Panama City conducted a sweepstakes where students with perfect attendance, good test scores, and positive attitudes were entered into a sweepstakes for a variety of prizes including a new car worth $18,000 US.Bribery? External motivation? No different than awarding plaques or pizza parties? Perhaps you would like to see evidence of how effectively external rewards raise test scores?

The effect of high stakes tests

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) suggests that several negative outcomes can result from high-stakes testing, including:

• An increased risk of student failure and drop-out
  
  
• Blaming teachers for issues (social and resource-based) out of their control
  
  
• Test scores become the coin of the realm, not education per se

On the other side, a study comparing the FCAT to a low stakes SAT-9 test showed a high correlation between subjects tested and improvement over time.  In other words, teaching to the FCAT “contributed to student performance on broader measures of student learning” (Greene, 2003). So, by this account, teaching to the test is useful in terms of providing students with the skills they need outside the classroom.

Hmmm….

What troubles many researchers and educators about high stakes exams like the FCAT is that a student’s life chances and education opportunities are based on a single instance of a test. If a student is having a bad day and he or she scores poorly on the test, they have little chance of redeeming themselves. It’s also fair to question whether a single test score reflects a student’s true ability or proficiency.There are additional concerns about whether or not a test is aligned with the curriculum. How can we validate this? By standardizing curriculum (oh dear!)? Is that really any guarantee educators are adequately teaching the curriculum? Do students really learn more when they are taught how to take the test?

There are also a number of questions concerning remediation opportunities, language differences among students, students with disabilities, reliability of test usage concerns, as well as other unintended consequences of high stakes tests.

A New Story

High stakes tests probably will not be going away anytime soon. They account for a narrowing of instruction, which could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, depending on the educator and his or her context.

Do rewards work?

Alfie Kohn (1993) suggests that

The answer depends on what we mean by "work." Research suggests that, by and large, rewards succeed at securing one thing only: temporary compliance. When it comes to producing lasting change in attitudes and behavior, however, rewards, like punishment, are strikingly ineffective. Once the rewards run out, people revert to their old behaviors.

Educational reform needs to focus on the underlying issues of school performance. Some of these issues are socioeconomic in nature; others have to do with educators, educator preparation, school resources and conditions, etc. Focusing on test scores alone is a mere finger in the dike; policy makers, principals, and teachers should know better.

So what can we do?

To change the system, we need to approach school reform from all angles and involve all stakeholders (i.e., parents, teachers, principals, AND students). There is no magic bullet, no one-size-fits-all solution. Accountability needs to exist yet so does flexibility. Several guidelines do seem apparent:

• Recognition that school reform is needed -- this requires both vision and leadership
  
  
• Identify all hidden assumptions about schooling and school culture, i.e., determine which structural elements are responsible for current conditions
  
  
• Communicate goals and report progress openly, i.e., all cards on the table face up at all times
  
  
• Initiatives should start from the bottom and be supported from the top, i.e., foster emergence
  
  
• Open the budgeting process up to full disclosure, i.e., show everybody where the money goes
  
  
• Recognize that every decision has a political impact

To a large degree, schooling and school reform are about issues of power and control. An important question to consider might be: who has the power and control and what are they doing with it. Schooling, like politics, is about relationships. It is important then to recognize that the reform process is about building positive relationships between all stakeholders. It also goes back to the notion of fostering community in a society that spends more time relaxing in front of a television set than checking out books from the local library.

Organization and leadership also seem like critical factors in school reform. Can schools do it from within or do they need an external driver to make change happen? Can a group of savvy parents create enough tension? Obviously, the solution is complex and needs buy in from the bottom up and the top down.

If you are aware of any communities who “took back” their schools, I’d love to hear about it. We need more stories like that to help us make meaningful reform a reality.


Offline reference:

Kohn, A. (1993). Why incentive plans cannot work. Harvard Business Review, 71(5).

Photo credit:

Doug Finger/Gainesville Sun

I was recently handed an article from a recent Review of Educational Research (Spring 2006) that focused on teaching courses online. This article is a literature review covering online education, Internet courses, distance teaching and learning, and Web-based instruction. A total of 76 studies are cited with a fair mix of quantitative and qualitative research. I had a feeling I would be in for a bumpy ride when the authors immediately reported complications in their analysis due to inconsistencies in terminology (e.g., is an online course a World Wide Web course, or an Internet course, or a computer-based course, or a cyberspace course, etc.).

My two cents:

This review uncovers several contradictory findings about the best way to conduct teaching and learning online. The findings suggest that what works for one set of students, doesn’t work for another group with often little to no accounting for these inconsistencies. For example, one study showed how well asynchronous discussions “mimicked the dynamics of real-time multivoiced discussions,” while another study observed that they provide a “lack of fluidity and conversational language” (p. 96).

Another interesting finding suggested the importance of recognizing students’ feelings, reactions, and responses in an online environment. At first after reading this observation I was struck by how odd it sounded. I have attended college courses off and on for over 10 years and I have trouble recalling students’ feelings ever being openly considered in class by a professor. I have seen professors recognize and respond to students’ reactions and responses, but never a student’s feelings. Is it because college classes are places where the focus is primarily on an objective reality as opposed to a subjective one? A place where students’ feelings are considered inappropriate and therefore not an issue? I’m not quite sure what to make of this finding.

What I found lacking in the research are repeated studies. It seems a study is conducted once with n number of subjects in a specific content area, and out of this, claims are being made, best practices are being defined. Is a sample of 400 professors adequate and representative of the entire professorate population? In my mind, this does not serve the discipline of academic or sociological research well. Before claims of what works best are made, it would seem studies need to show reliable and valid results over repeated trials. Perhaps because online teaching and learning is a relatively new endeavor, there hasn’t been enough time to gather good data. In the meantime, professors need tenure, so they will publish their research regardless of its merit (Ouch! Did I say that?).

Also worth noting is the amount of time researchers spend comparing elements of online courses with face to face courses. Isn’t this like comparing apples to oranges? How much coding of dialogue takes place when researchers evaluate face-to-face courses? What does such an analysis reveal? If it’s depth or complexity or levels of engagement, doesn’t that have more to do with the course facilitator and the course design? Should we be studying which personality types make better instructors/facilitators? And what would such findings lead to? Firing all instructors who have inconsistent or inappropriate teaching personalities? Wow, what a concept! (Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?).

To no surprise, the article reports “no comprehensive theory or model that informed studies of online instruction” (p. 115).  Most instructors or designers simply move text-based courses to the Internet following some form of pedagogy/androgogy and there are very few studies that examine this phenomenon. Perhaps it is wise to ask if there are any special guidelines needed? Is this another matter of personality wherein good instructors/facilitators follow basic pedagogical assumptions and then tweak them over time adjusting for the various assignments and levels of engagement? Would guidelines as such stifle creativity or provide support weaker instructors?

Without going into greater detail, the article provides a helpful stepping off point for exploring various aspects of teaching and learning online as well as differing aspects of online learning environments worth considering. Ultimately literature reviews of this type provide researchers opportunities to explore what’s happening in a particular field and often points the way to future research possibilities. As such, anybody studying distance education or online learning will probably find the bibliography and appendices quite helpful on a variety of levels.


Reference:

Tallent-Runnels, M.K., et al. (2006). Teaching courses online: A review of research. Review of Educational Research. 76(1): 93-135.

Photo credit:

Researchers  (pencil and watercolour), 1970 © The Estate of John David Roberts

What happens when we switch our attention from looking at how people learn to why people learn? We often call this difference motivation.

Motivation is very much a personal, psychological issue, one that resists a grand, unifying theory. Motivation focuses us on a task; it assists us in directing our attention; it helps us persist in our endeavors in spite of obstacles, and motivation aids us in the form of goals by which we measure ourselves and our learning.

In terms of learning, research suggests several strategies that can enhance motivation. These strategies are based on rather fundamental pedagogical conditions such as activity and engagement, learner choice and control, prior knowledge and beliefs, how we approach processing information, our ability to self-regulate, our ability to actively reflect, and often includes a good role model who embodies/demonstrates motivation.

So how do we produce learning environments that meet essential psychological needs and make effective/meaningful learning possible?

Educators make decisions that influence a learner’s sense of efficacy, their ability to make choices (and understand the consequences of their choices), and their ability to make connections on a variety of levels. Since learning is a self-regulated process, educators can only influence student learning, they are not the cause of it.

Educators thus are responsible for five major aspects of the learning environment’s organization: level of participation by the actors (in this case, the educator(s) and students), the context within which learning and interaction takes place externally (which can have internal consequences), the content and intended outcomes (goals), and the strategies used to direct learning. It is also worth noting that surrounding this learning environment is a larger institutional environment and culture that shapes what occurs within the immediate learning environment. Each of these aspects is necessarily porous and intertwined with the others and is greatly influenced by the design of the learning environment.

Motivation is similar to learning in that it involves intentionality, processes, and outcomes. Ideally, we want learners to be self-determining, purposive, and intrinsically directed. We may even infer that the most desirable learning experiences are ones that are not only self-directed, but that involve a sense of discovery.

It must be noted that in formal learning environments, not all learning experiences are intrinsically motivated. We attend school often out of necessity. Researchers such as Levesque et al (2006) suggest that

• [b]y creating learning environments that satisfy students’ basic psychological needs, educators can facilitate students’ natural propensity to integrate their reasons for behaving and move toward more self-determined forms of motivation (p. 101).

Therefore, the authors suggest that the goal of formal educational ecologies should be

• to create environments that facilitate the internalization of extrinsically motivated behaviors instrumental for satisfying the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Those positive forms of motivation would in turn foster engagement, knowledge transfer, and the development of metacognition in students, which would then lead to positive learning outcomes (p. 101).

In other words, the authors suggest that as we become comfortable with and supported by externally regulated behaviors (that lead us toward achievement and success), we can begin to internalize these behaviors and possibly integrate them within ourselves and our identity, thus making what was once an extrinsic motivation and intrinsic one. When you put it like that, it sounds rather simple, no?

The bottom line
No one make you learn something you don’t want to learn. Yet educators can influence certain facets of the formal learning environment that allow learners to feel empowered, competent, and capable of making positive use of what they’ve learned.

Motivation and educational technology
This is why I am thrilled to see so much energy being poured into educational technologies, computer games, blogs, wikis, informal learning, and other areas that are a part of our world that until recently would never be considered educational. Engagement is key. Interactivity is key. Empowerment is key. Connecting to others both globally and locally can help foster an understanding and an appreciation for “otherness” that currently divides people unnecessarily (i.e., the social in social software).

Now that’s motivating.

[Note: this review of motivation and learning is offered for formal learning environments (i.e., much more could/should be said and studied regarding informal learning motivation).]

Reference(s):

Levesque, C.S., Sell, G. R., & Zimmerman, J.A. (2006) A theory-based integrative model for learning and motivation in higher education. In To Improve the Academy V 24 Sandra Chadwick-Blossey & Douglass Robertson (Eds).  Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

Getting started

In an attempt to foster new story development, I piloted a professional development blogging workshop for a local K-12 laboratory school.

First, I was invited to pitch the workshop during a faculty meeting about four weeks prior to the end of the school year. The teachers in the room looked a bit tired (rightly so) thus the prospect of doing more work with no additional pay probably turned more than half of the room completely off.

Nevertheless, after a few additional email prompts, I was able to set up two workshops of five weeks each. The workshop was set up on a wiki (email me for access) and focused on creating a weblog, using an aggregator, exploring and evaluating weblogs in teaching and learning environments, and analyzing limitations, professional development, and hot button issues associated with technology and schools.

My initial workshop started out with five participants each from different disciplines (including math, social studies, biological sciences, and economics). The first session was face-to-face so we could build our blogs together. I decided to try Blogger to host the websites. I figured it would be relatively easy to set up and easy for non-techies to work with (plus there are a few well-crafted tutorials available online to assist them down the road if they wanted to make further adjustments). Things were going along swimmingly until we started going through the various options to include. Several participants wanted to add links to their sidebar that required some knowledge of html which became a bit of a disappointment. I managed to get people set up and we quickly created Bloglines accounts to aggregate each others blogs.

Off and running

After an initial post by the group I figured participants would be able to follow the instructions on the wiki and proceed on their own. We agreed to post items on Mondays giving others an opportunity to comment on at least one participants post. After the first week, one participant dropped out due to various issues involved in end-of-the-year school activities. By week three, all but one participant remained. However, the one remaining participant was an excellent sport and really took the time to examine the issues defined in the wiki assignments.

Here are a few comments he shared with me regarding the use of blogs in a teaching and learning environment:

• This is much easier than creating and updating a website.
  
  
• I like the use for outbound information to students
  
  
• I am not sure that I am thrilled with the idea of comments.
  
  
• I do not want to manage these or comment to my 120 kids.
  
  
• I am afraid that I will not look as often as the kids look so they may give up.
  
  
• I will continue to use it.
  
  
• I have set up a blog for golf and do find it quicker then managing a web page.
  
  
• I think the course is good. I am not sure how to manage the time. I thought we were supposed to read the items by Sunday, blog Monday or Tuesday, and comment until the following Sunday. I would clarify this for the next class. I found the course well set up and I enjoyed looking at the sites you chose.

You can imagine how helpful I found these comments to be.

This participant also shared a number of comments regarding teacher professional development that I thought would be worth sharing:

Fear, time management, and information overload

• The use of blogs for teacher professional development is exceptional but unfortunately may be limited. The limits include sifting through information, time for blogging, and fear of the internet.
  
  
• The amount of information on blogs is staggering. When I google geometry blogs, I get 196,801 sites. Classroom management get 68,448 sites. This is only the blog sites. If I add the internet who knows what I can find. I can sort for days and still be missing the best site and…I cannot google for days. When I looked into teacher requirement for time last year I estimated that I am paid for 420 hours outside of my classes. I need 600 hours for required work and I have 300 hours for special projects and other workload. This is around 3 hours per school day. I do not have much more time. I can only hope that others can find some of the information that I need and share it with me.
  
  
• The fear of the internet is the strangest part. If people do not get past the problem of what kids might be exposed to, I fear that education is dead. I know that I was not supposed to see Playboy when I was young but I managed to get a copy. Kids will get to all of the sites and places we fear. We better manage the kid rather than try to control where they look. Teach them how to avoid the risks and set up consequences. That will be better then filters.
  

Communities of practice/inquiry

• I can only imagine some of the options for professional development. We could share discipline problems, learning issues, lesson plans, ideas on testing, frustrations, hopes, fears and even how to use technology and blogging. I can find mentor teachers and people that have dealt with problems that I have. I can solve all of my teaching issues but ……(is there is always a but), can I find what I need, when I need it and of the quality that I need?

After reviewing this workshop participant’s comments, a newbie to the blogosphere, I felt he came away with a strong sense of the possibilities and pitfalls associated with using weblogs and the Internet to support teaching and learning and professional development. I believe he represents the voice of many teachers across the globe as they attempt to discover ways to better themselves, their students, and their teaching. I chose to address several of his concerns on his blog and via email concerning time management, fear, and information overload, yet I chose not provide answers per se. I wanted to see if I could get him to think of possible solutions. Having more participants would have made for a better exchange of ideas. Hopefully that will be the case next time. If you have any thoughts on his comments above, please pass them along.

My next workshop begins in two weeks with six teachers and one administrator scheduled to participate. If you have any comments or ideas that you think might be helpful, please let me know. If you would like access or to amend the wiki, just drop me a line (csessums@gmail.com).

What do video games have in common with learning?

Prensky (2003) notes that in video games, players

• have to do something (learn to fly, engage in a quest, etc.); 
• aggregate information from multiple sources and make decisions quickly;
• determine the games rules from playing rather than being told;
• develop strategies to overcome obstacles;
• learn complex systems via experimentation;
• learn from failure, or more precisely, learn to overcome failure; and
• in multiplayer games, they must learn to collaborate.

These concepts seem like reasonable expectations of a formal learning environment. So, in general, how come most schools are often described by kids as “boring” or “a waste of time”?

If teaching involves a certain level of motivation, i.e., figuring out how to engage, activate, stimulate and inspire learners and learning, perhaps analyzing how video games are structured might be beneficial in terms of providing a more engaging framework for schooling.

How are video games structured?

Video games are typically separated into categories such as Adventure, Fantasy, Strategy, Puzzles, Role-playing, Sports, and Hybrids or multi-genre. Many popular games involve some level of a “quest” which seems rather fitting for developing minds and bodies.

Games are often built around specific components such as character traits, game rewards, obstacles, a narrative or story line, competition, and in some cases collaboration. This oddly sounds like a Tolkien novel or even Wuthering Heights to a large extent. Similarly, when a reader becomes engrossed in a novel, they able to empathize with the feelings and emotional states of the characters they are reading about (engaged with, if you will). In turn, emotional reactions generated through video games include such feelings as curiosity, fear, power, aggression, wonder, joy, and frustration. (I am curious to know if feelings of helplessness, futility, and dominance also exist among video game players? Having read texts by Sartre, Toni Morrison, and Shakespeare, I can admit to having felt these and more. Do video games produce these feelings as well? If so, how does a player react? Do they put the game away of attempt to work through these feelings?)

Researchers like Csikszentmihalyi (1990) talk about how the level of engagement felt by video game players or engrossed novel readers leaves them in a state of “flow” whereby a person’s self-consciousness disappears, time becomes indistinct, and the activity itself becomes intrinsically rewarding. So how can educators create this level of flow in schools?

Hmmmm… easier said than done. Is it possible for educators to establish clear goals that learners find meaningful? Can/should geometry be turned into a “quest” for Pythagoras or a quest for the origins of geometry (Sorry Husserl)? In this way we combine history, science, mathematics, philosophy all in one course?Is it possible that we create learning environments with multiple goal structures and multiple difficulty levels to adjust difficulty to learner skill sets? Is this what we mean when we talk about personalizing learning?

Is it possible to create an educational environment that is related tied to an emotionally appealing fantasy and metaphor that is related to the skills we are developing along the way? A edutaining movie I was quite fond of as a primary school student was Donald in Mathmagic Land. In one of the “chapters” of the story, the strings of a lyre were associated with different lengths that were geometrically associated showing how music and maths were tightly connected. This story was told from a historical perspective and used clever animation and music to illustrate its points. Although my teacher could have demonstrated all of these concepts on the chalkboard, she chose to introduce these concepts in a way we would find engaging. She regularly had us recall elements of the movie as she outlined similar ideas on the board and so the lessons were all scaffolded around this movie. Emotionally appealing, you bet. Plus the movie provided us a random element of surprise. We were so used to being skilled and drilled, that the movie served as a way to “wake” us up to how maths could be fun and interesting.

The reality of education

The truth is most learners in conventional, teacher led classes have little control over what they learn. Learning is a passive activity where teachers or county administrators often choose materials. Students are asked to conform to the speed and ability level of the group they are assigned, and feedback on their work is often shallow and wooly.

If we think of video games as a model for improving learning environments, we would be offering clear goals, challenging situations that could permit collaboration. Assessments would be criterion based which in turn would permit students more control over the learning process. We could generate flow by engaging learners in problem-based learning environments, through inquiry-based apprenticeships, where learners assume an active role in pursuing goals meaningful to them.  We could even consider using performance-based assessments based on actual student performance in authentic contexts.

This notion of video games as models for traditional learning environments relates back to role of teacher preparation programs that I regularly bang on about. That is, teacher colleges should be teaching educators to think like designers, not delivery-bots. I’m not suggesting that learning should be simple and easy. I’m also not suggesting that learning should not require people to move out from their comfort zones. I am suggesting that learning environments need to be planned in such a way that they are engaging and lead to real and meaningful applications. Students should know that memorizing all these little bits of information is leading to something bigger and practical that will serve them well the rest of their days. If not, why are they doing it?

Also worth noting is that the idea of using video games as a model for traditional learning environments is related to a diffusion of innovation theoretical perspective. Video games are an invading species that are foreign to most learning ecologies (although the model on which they are built isn’t terribly foreign). Educators can easily reject them (or such a perspective) or begin to adopt them and as such we would expect to see video games (and/or such a design perspective) propagate over time.

Perhaps it’s a generational issue and indeed in a matter of time, such a learning design model will be de rigeur. Similarly, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before we’re electing legislators and enacting laws via our mobile phones a la American Idol  ….

 References:

Bowman, R.F. 1982. A Pac-Man theory of motivation. Tactical implications for classroom instruction. Educational Technology 22(9), 14-17.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optical Experience. New York: Harper Perennial.

Prensky, M. (2003). Digital game-based learning. ACM Computers in Entertainment, 1(1), pp. 1-4.

Squire, K. (2003). Video games in education. Retrieved 13 June 2006 from here.

Photo credit:

Space Invader Icon, Covent Garden, London 2004 & Space Invader Icon, Brick Lane, London 2002 Copyright artofthestat.

In previous research I have attempted to examine what a blog can be. Many weblogs invite a level of engagement serving as a means for sharing or interacting with others.

In a recent paper presented to the American Educational Research Association (April 11, 2006) in San Francisco entitled Blogging as participation: The active sociality of a new literacy, researchers Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel raise a number of interesting questions regarding the notion of participation on blogs. They focus specifically on a blog associated with a relatively popular television show called Project Runway, a serialized reality program about a fashion design competition.

As I read through this piece, it seemed that many of the questions Lankshear and Knobel ask about the nature of participation could be useful in examining any number of courses that use blogs as a means of interaction or engaging with others and/or the ideas of others.

I’ve taken the liberty of modifying several of their questions yet, I am curious to see if you think these seem relative or pertinent in terms of the type of data and information they might yield concerning the nature of asynchronous online participation.

• Who is making significant numbers of comments?
  
  
• Can participants be categorized based on the nature of their participation -- e.g., questioners, critics, one-liners, topic leapers, etc.?
  
  
• Can patterns of interaction between participants be identified? Who is talking to whom? On what topics are they interacting?
  
  
• Are there participants who garner more attention than others? Who is ignored?
  
  
• Do participants feel they are part of a larger learning community or do they feel like individuals operating independently of one another?
  
  
• Are comments taken up in other blog posts? If so, which ones, by whom, about what?
  
  
• Does a course blog go through identity changes? If so, do these changes reflect the changes associated with participation?
  
  
• Do participants comments and/or perceived attitudes change over time? In what ways do they change? Do they change based on the participation/contribution of others?
  
  
• Does the idea of participation and sharing appear related to the notion of the co-creation of knowledge?

If you can think of any other related questions, please pass them along. If any question seems irrelevant or misleading, please let me know as well.