Is the Pope Jewish, II: classroom technology and the children of technocrats

In a post I wrote just two weeks ago, I discussed two New York Times articles about the failure of technology in the classroom to raise test scores in Arizona, and the failure of one of the most acclaimed educational technologies, Cognitive Tutor, to raise test scores in general. I concluded by asking:

Will these recent exposés about the limitations of educational technology for subjects other than computer science have any effect whatsoever on the edtech bandwagon?...We might as well ask whether the Pope is Jewish.

Sure enough, just one week later (last Wednesday), yet another NY Times article on online education appears, this one discussing how the Munster Indiana school district has jumped on the bandwagon:

Laura Norman used to ask her seventh-grade scientists to take out their textbooks and flip to Page Such-and-Such. Now, she tells them to take out their laptops.

The day all have seen coming — traditional textbooks being replaced by interactive computer programs — arrived this year in this traditional, well-regarded school district.

Munster's technological revolution was particularly sudden:

Unlike the tentative, incremental steps of digital initiatives at many schools nationwide, Munster made an all-in leap in a few frenetic months — removing all math and science textbooks for its 2,600 students in grades 5 to 12, and providing a window into the hurdles and hiccups of such an overhaul.

But Munster isn't the first to go digital:

Schools in Mooresville, N.C., for example, started moving away from printed textbooks four years ago, and now 90 percent of their curriculum is online.

and:

Munster’s is part of a new wave of digital overhauls in the two dozen states that have historically required schools to choose textbooks from government-approved lists. Florida, Louisiana, Utah and West Virginia approved multimedia textbooks for the first time for the 2011-12 school year, and Indiana went so far as to scrap its textbook-approval process altogether, partly because, officials said, the definition of a textbook will only continue to fracture.

The cost? Munster has paid $1.1 million for infrastructure while parents pay an annual $150 rental fee for laptops, Schools in general: are "spending an estimated $2.2 billion on educational software."

The benefits? No efficacy data is cited, of course. Students, to some extent, get to work at their own rates. And then there's this:

Angela Bartolomeo’s sixth graders spent a recent Wednesday rearranging terms of equations on an interactive Smart Board and dragging-and-dropping answers in ways that chalkboards never could. (In between, a cartoon character exclaimed that “Multiplying by 1 does not change the value of a number!” in his best superhero baritone.)

And this:

Ms. Norman, the seventh-grade science teacher, is using material from Discovery Education, which on that Wednesday included videos from Discovery’s “Mythbuster” series (commercial-free), an interactive glossary and other eye candy to help students investigate whether cellphones cause cancer. When Ms. Norman told the students to take out their ear buds to watch a video, two in the back yelped, “Cool!”

And this:

“With a textbook, you can only read what’s on the pages — here you can click on things and watch videos,” said Patrick Wu, a seventh grader. “It’s more fun to use a keyboard than a pencil. And my grades are better because I’m focusing more.”

Whether students are focusing on the right things is another matter. And wouldn't it be nice if there were explanations, rather than exclamations, regarding what happens when you multiply a number by 1? The basic problem with computerized instruction, as I noted earlier, is that it almost never provides perspicuous feedback. Answers are either right, or wrong, and that's it.

Perhaps no one knows the limitations of computer software better than computer software experts. Where are these people sending their kids to school?  An article in this weekend's New York Times provides a glimpse. Focusing on Silicon valley, it describes how the chief technology officer of eBay, along with "employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard," are sending their children to the area's Waldorf school:

The school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Noting that "three-quarters of the students here have parents with a strong high-tech connection," the Times observes:

Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

The article quotes Waldorf parent Alan Eagle, who "holds a computer science degree from Dartmouth and works in executive communications at Google, where he has written speeches for the chairman," and who "uses an iPad and a smartphone:"

“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school... The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

Of course, there is one particular way in which computers could be highly effective teaching tools: for instruction in computer programming. But has there has been a rise, or a decline, in computer programming instruction in the decades since schools began jumping on the edtech bandwagon? We might as well ask whether the pope is Jewish.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

Front page articles on the edtech bandwagon

Fast on the heels of a front page New York Times exposé on how education technology has failed to raise test scores comes a front page Education Week article on the virtues of replacing teacher-centered lessons at school with technology-centered lessons at home.  The technology in question is that of the Khan Academy, whose library of lectures and problem sets is impressive in its vastness but not in its instructional feedback. If you input a wrong answer to a math problem you are told that your answer is wrong, but not why, nor how to fix it. Despite this, the Khan Academy has empowered teachers like 10th grade biology teacher Susan Kramer to skip over direct, structured instruction, and instead to watch her students "weave through rows of desks, pretending to be proteins and picking up plastic-bead 'carbohydrates' and goofy 'phosphate' hats as they navigate their 'cell.'"

To be fair, the Khan Academy (1) hasn't been around that long and (2) is the creation of a former hedge fund manager with degrees in math, computer science, and engineering but not in, say, cognitive science and child development. As such, the Khan Academy hasn't profited from the "over 20 years of research into how students think and learn" that underpins more established educational software programs like Carnegie Mellon's Cognitive Tutor.

So it was a bit disconcerting to find, fast on the heels of the Edweek's Khan Academy article, a front page article in Sunday's New York Times on Cognitive Tutor, and how it, too, has turned out to have no statistically significant impact on test scores. While I'd never had a chance to try it out (unlike the Khan Academy, Cognitive Tutor gates access to demos and charges big bucks instead of nothing at all), I'd heard only good things about it, and J enjoyed soaring through its algebra lessons during middle school. But as soon as I read the Times' description of its pedagogy, its limitations became crystal clear:

When the screen says: “You are saving to buy a bicycle. You have $10, and each day you are able to save $2,” the student must convert the word problem into an algebraic expression. If he is stumped, he can click on the “Hint” button.

“Define a variable for the time from now,” the software advises. Still stumped? Click “Next Hint.”

“Use x to represent the time from now.” Aha. The student types “2x+10.”

A math buff would soar right through this; for anyone else, the hints seem way too much of a crutch. There's no mechanism here for ensuring that you're working things out to the best of your ability before resorting to "hint"---i.e., nothing to stop you from clicking "hint" the moment you're not sure what to do. And what if your answer is almost right: say you forgot to include the initial $10, or let x stand for hours rather than days? As far as I can tell (I've now tried it out a bit), you're either right or wrong, and that's it. The program simply isn't sophisticated enough to highlight exactly what needs adjustment. And there's a very simple reason for this. As I discovered in creating a software  program that highlights grammatical errors in English phrases and sentences, this kind of perspicuous feedback takes a huge amount of coding (of the sort that you don't find in any other language teaching software program, thank you very much). Programming in the analogous feedback for mathematical expressions and equations strikes me as even more prohibitive.

On closer inspection, therefore, Cognitive Tutor seems inevitably to foster--in all but the brightest, most motivated students (the ones most able to basically teach themselves)--far too passive of a learning environment for lasting learning. Indeed, the only truly active learning environment that I've ever seen in any software program for any academic subject is that which a computer programming language platform provides for--what else?--computer programming. Only here does the feedback--the error messages or the unexpected outputs--precisely reflect what you've done wrong.

Will these recent exposés about the limitations of educational technology for subjects other than computer science have any effect whatsoever on the edtech bandwagon?

We might as well ask whether recent cognitive science findings have had any effect on how schools teach "higher level thinking." Or whether mainstreaming kids on the autistic spectrum has had any effect on mandatory group work and personal reflections. Or whether parental concerns have had any effect on schools choosing Reform Math. Or whether, for that matter, the Pope is Jewish.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

tired and overpaid

patentlawyer, Bonnie, and Steve H on careers in computer science and manufacturing--

patentlawyer:

We read this story every few months but most of these "manufacturers" aren't telling the whole truth.

They aren't talking about how they gutted their own training programs in the 80's and 90's, because someone @ the WSJ/Harvard Business School told them to get lean, downsize, rightsize, or out source.

They aren't talking about how automation has really decimated their bread and butter parts and they have to move up to small runs of specialized parts @ high margins to make the money they're used to making.

They aren't talking about how most of their want ads require years of experience and often times a degree.

They aren't talking about how boring it is to work on a lathe for 8 hour stretches.

The reality is that they want experienced people, but they do not want to spend the money to train and retain their employees.

At least in Houston, there are more than enough people that can read blue prints, calculate sin/cos/tang/hyp if necessary. That area of Houston they're talking about is about 10 miles away from NASA and the aerospace/defense contractor hub in Clear Lake City.

We shouldn't have any sympathy for short sighted companies. Nor should we think that the US is in some kind of STEM bind.

There are plenty of out of work born in America engineers now, and plenty of would-be-engineers creamed by grade curves and weed out courses. If you head over to any of the comp sci/it/science/engineering fora, you'll see just how vast and deep the pool is.

Bonnie:

Actually, in CS, enrollments have plummeted in the last few years, to the extent that CS departments are being closed. However, I agree with you on the role of companies. The reason students chose not to major in CS is that they saw their parents laid off from their tech jobs, forced to train their replacements in India (and I know several people personally that had to do that, including my husband). Companies refuse to invest in training or education for their technical employees, instead figuring they can be replaced once their 10 year technical lifespan has expired. Kids saw this happen, and decided that they would rather major in finance, where they can actually be paid well. 

Steve H:

I agree with patentlawyer. I've seen this argument before, and once again, it's not clearly defined. I deal with many companies that bring in computer-aided design and CNC technology. There is more demand than supply. Companies don't like to train because they see these people move on to better paying jobs. Why pay to train someone in SolidWorks who will immediately leave? Just demand that education provide them ready to go. But what, exactly, are these skills? It's not trigonometry.

"Manufacturers say the U.S. education system doesn't produce enough students strong in math, science and engineering."

People with science, math, or engineering degrees won't fill these positions, and companies can train bright high school graduates to meet this demand.

Let's say that a company buys a CNC cutting machine and it comes with a program that nests geometry and generates the G-code to drive the machine. Is this taught in school? Also, where does this geometry come from, a 2D CAD drawing program, a 3D solid modeling program, or a surface modeling program like Rhino? Do they teach these programs in school? You don't learn this in high school geometry. Do schools teach the issues of geometry transfer that cost companies so much time and money?

Look at the skills that companies have in their job ads. Do they say "trigonometry"? Do they ask for people who have critical thinking skills? No. They want specialized skills that are rarely taught in schools. That's why our local vocational school (which offers college degrees) is so popular. They teach these applications and skills. Companies should ask for more vocational schools.

How many job ads say that they are looking for those who had good grades in trig and that they will train. No, you see ads with very specific software or machine skills required, loaded with all sorts of product names (like MasterCAM) and acronyms. Companies might want critical thinking skills, but what they have in the ads are specific product skills. That's why older workers are vulnerable. Companies don't care about general educational background. They care about the latest products and skills. It doesn't matter how experienced you are if that experience is with DEC's VMS. If you don't manage your career carefully, you will end up on a legacy path where the company will not pay for training. One company where my wife worked made a comment about how people over 40 are tired, overpaid, and don't know the latest technology.