Computers and Education

Sixty years' research by Jean Piaget and collaborators throughout the world show knowledge to be an active construction, a growing fabric of ideas and relationships rather than an inert collection of facts and associations.

Abstract

What's the future of computers in American education? A boom or a bust or somewhere in the middle? Let's look at the issue in context. The present goals of American education at all levels are largely concerned with static knowledge. That is, they are concerned with the reception and storage of information and associations. In general, learners are viewed as receptors. Therefore, transmission, repetition, and reward are the principal means of education. The student is a passive entity, and knowledge is seen as stuff to be stored and brought up at test time. Teachers focus on more efficient ways to transmit associations and school administrators focus on numerical data purporting to measure students' retrieval of associations, facts and conventions. The problem is that it works! Organisms-we are all organismsadapt. Students learn the game and we are all the poorer. It is the rare teacher above fourth grade who reports that children are eager, inquisitive, and willing to tackle new problems. Kids are b-o-r-e-d and are labeled lazy. From fourth grade through graduate school, students often won't tackle an original problem. A physics professor from a prestigious university tells me, My students won't work on a problem unless they can slip a ready-made formula out of their hip pocket. How did such a situation come about? Much of the thinking about goals and means of American education comes directly from the assembly lines of 1910 when American school administrators embraced the Ford Motor Company as a model for education, adopting factory-oriented thinking with three themes: (1) mass production policies and practices; (2) cost-effectiveness; and (3) time/motion efficiency research. Read Raymond L. Callahan's classic Education and the Cult of Efficiency and weep. Psychological research is a second influence on education. Many studies involve brute memory with meaning deliberately banished in order to ensure scientific cleanliness. Much of the research is not only concerned with performance under various external conditions of reward and punishment, but it involves animals rather than children. A third prop to American education is perhaps the weakest and most disturbing. American education has seen a parade of fads and bandwagons. Remember the Initial Teaching Alphabet? Programmed instruction? Modern math? Behavioral objectives? Performance-based contracting? The open classroom? The talking typewriter? Each of these innovations was proclaimed the be-all and end-all of educational solutions and the fact that none of them lasted attests to educators' short attention span, to their unwillingness to look at underlying issues, and to the resiliency of the factory/stimulus-response model of education. Are computers in education another bandwagon? There is, in fact, a body of research on education quite different from the brute memory/nonsense syllable/external reward tradition. Sixty years' research by Jean Piaget and collaborators throughout the world show knowledge to be an active construction, a growing fabric of ideas and relationships rather than an inert collection of facts and associations. In this view, one's fabric of knowledge constantly interacts with the outside world, and the outside world acts on the fabric modifying it to incorporate the new reality. The reality so organized by the mind tends toward coherence, stability, economy, and generalizability. Two other aspects of this theory are worth noting. The fabrics of a sixyear-old are smaller and less numerous than those of most adults, of course, but-more important-they are intrinsically different from ours. A child's cup of knowledge is not only less full than an adult's but it consists of different stuff. Second, one's fabric of ideas doesn't only interact with reality but tends to develop and grow. If the conditions permitting and provoking extension and elaboration of the fabric are available, development takes place. If not, growth is stunted and the organism seeks fruitful interaction with other realities. The key to learning according to this theory is dissonance, i.e. mismatch between where we are and where we want or need to be. The dissonance must involve a moderate mismatch with the fabric. If it's too small, boredom sets in. If the dissonance is too great, (differential equations for the average 12-year-old) there's more boredom and a move to arenas in which moderate mismatch obtains. But given moderate dissonance, we act as though pre-wired. Dissonance is irresistibly engaging. There are many aspects of dissonance that lend themselves to educational situations. A major aspect of dissonance-widely employed in present schooling-is competition. But what about self-competition? Challenge? Surprise? Regularity and its absence? Novelty? Mystery? Uncertainty? Complexity? Ambiguity? Curiosity? Quest? Where in the educational literature, or in teachers' guides, has attention been given to these issues, except to warn against such stuff? All of this sets the stage for several points about computers, interactivity and dissonance: Computers in the classroom and the home can provide individual children and children in small groups with moderate dissonance at the child's level of choice, thus making learning an active construction rather than a passive warehousing. Contrast this situation with the traditional classroom where all children work the same textbook, often the same page! Computers can transcend local space/budget constraints and reach