THE ROLE OF ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS IN SCHOOLS:
A NATIONAL STUDY
10/16/96
CAST
39 Cross Street
Peabody, MA 01960
508 531-8555
sfollansbee@cast.org
http://www.cast.org
Project Director: Sari Follansbee
Project Coordinator: Niki Gilsdorf
Training and Support: Skip Stahl
Curriculum Design: Joan Dunfey & Susan Cohen
Research: Bart Pisha & Bob Hughes
In his State of the Union speech in January 1996, President Clinton pronounced "Every Classroom in America must be connected to the information superhighway... by the year 2000." The estimated cost is $47 billion. The move to 'wire' all schools in the United States has been supported by Vice President Al Gore, Reed Hundt of the Federal Communications Commission and Linda Roberts of the Department of Education, to name only a few government leaders. President Clinton and the others underscore a widely held belief that online communications will improve our educational system. Based on this belief, major efforts to connect schools to telecommunications networks are underway.
Online connections appear to be critically important if students are to grow up literate in the 21st century. Yet online access in itself may not be sufficient to bring about improvements in student learning. Past research on computers in schools suggests that computer installation is only the beginning; other factors, such as integration of technology into the curriculum, teacher training, and ongoing support are important components for success. We urgently need research specifically evaluating the effectiveness of online communications for learning. In addition, we need to understand what kinds of supports for curriculum integration, training, and online use are required for the success of this new medium in school.
CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) begins to address these needs with the study reported here: the Scholastic Telecommunications Study (STS). CAST, an independent educational research and development organization, designed and conducted STS to evaluate the effectiveness of online use, as distinguished from the use of other technologies and curricular reforms, for improved student learning. The research was sponsored by Scholastic Inc., an educational publishing company, and the Council of the Great City Schools, a Washington-based lobbying organization for urban school districts in the United States.
STS was conducted in seven of the nation's major cities during the 1995-96 school year. The goals of the study were: 1) to measure the effects of online use on student learning including information processing, communication, and presentation skills, and 2) to gain insights into what it takes to use online communications effectively in the classroom.
Key features of STS are:
The study begins to answer some key questions that must be answered as our nation moves forward to connect our schools to the information superhighway. This report highlights initial findings and suggests directions for further research.
Discussion
A Civil Rights Unit was the instructional focus of the study and was designed to be implemented by both experimental and control classes. It was developed to allow teachers the flexibility to teach a unit of study that they most likely had taught in the past and it provided teachers with suggestions for activities and ways to integrate online use into the ongoing curriculum. The curriculum supports helped students and teachers organize their work and develop strategies for analyzing and synthesizing information, An often-heard -criticism of online use in classrooms is that the amount of resources available can easily overwhelm students and teachers, thereby doing more harm than good. The STS curricular framework and worksheets offered strategies to help students identify key elements of their topic, to organize the information they found into categories, and to structure their ideas into a compelling presentation for their project.
Student project data indicate that students who had online access learned more in the Civil Rights Unit than students who did not go online. The experimental group seemed to be more able to take advantage of the curriculum supports and the many resource and communication opportunities available to them. Their final projects were rated as stronger overall, and stronger in most of the specific competencies measured. The experimental group scored significantly higher than the control group on measurements of information management, communication, and presentation of ideas. This offers evidence that using Scholastic Network and the Internet can help students become independent, critical thinkers, able to find information, organize and evaluate it, and then effectively express their new knowledge and ideas in compelling ways.
These results are particularly striking because both experimental and control classes undertook the same projects and both were encouraged to take advantage of computer tools and resources in the Civil Rights Unit. Teacher reports and the makeup of the projects submitted confirm that students in the control group did use computers, although they did not go online. This targets online use as a key differentiating factor in student performance within this study.
In addition to the effects of online use on the quality of student projects, there are other indicators of its positive influence on student performance. Analyses of questionnaire data demonstrate that online use impacts students' perceptions of their ability to participate in a project-based unit. Students who used online resources and activities showed increased confidence in carrying out and presenting a research project over the course of the study. Competencies less closely tied to their participation in the Civil Rights Unit, such as basic skills in reading, writing, arithmetic, did not show similar boosts in confidence.
Interestingly, the increased confidence of students in the experimental group did not extend to other information management and communication skills such as finding and organizing information or working with other students. Given the brief 2-3 month period that experimental classes used online resources and activities in the study, it is understandable that the positive effects of online use were found only on carrying out and presenting a research project - the skill most closely related to their project assignment and did not transfer to more general abilities.
One finding from the student questionnaire analyses indicates a possible negative influence of online use. Students in the experimental group showed decreased confidence in their ability to share work and participate in discussions over the course of the study. Again, this could be related to the shortness of the study. Students had limited time to complete the research for their projects leaving fewer opportunities for interaction. It is also understandable that this would be more pronounced for students in the experimental group because they were involved in online resource gathering as well as online communication which, in its newness, may have redirected their attention away from sharing work and participating in class discussions.
Another indicator of the positive effects of online use are student reports of changes in their own behavior. On the questionnaires, changes in use of computers over the course of the study were analyzed. Students with online access reported significantly greater use of computers in four different areas - gathering information, organizing and presenting information multimedia projects, and help with basic skills. Once experimental students had experience with online communications, they reported an increase in how much they use computers for the types of activities related to project-based instruction and for which online use is well suited. In contrast, control students reported less frequent use of computers for similar activities from the beginning to the end of the study. It appears that the experimental students were differentiating themselves by using the computer in more powerful ways - the kind that will be important in the workplace of their future.
Congruent with the above, teacher comments from the telephone interview provide rich anecdotal evidence of the positive effects of online use. Teachers in the experimental group reported that during STS their students found information more quickly, drew resources from a larger number sources in a wider variety of formats, and dealt with information in ways that made the material more relevant to their lives. They felt that email and message boards helped their students learn from other students, teachers, and the community at large. .
Not all students showed the same pattern of effects. The breakout of project mean scores by grade suggests that online use has a greater effect on student Teaming in 6th grade than in 4th grade. This is corroborated by teacher comments in their telephone interview. Although many teachers in both grades indicated that their students learned a great deal, 4th grade teachers noted that the project work was "a stretch" for their students. These grade-level differences could be due to a developmental change which generally happens in 3rd and 4th grade, where students shift from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." Analyses of the student projects indicate that all students can benefit from online use although younger students and their teachers appear to need greater supports in carrying out a project-based unit of study that requires substantial research and communication skills.
In sum, increased student teaming for students with online use is clearly demonstrated by their performance on student projects and changes in their subjective reports on pre-study and post-study questionnaires. Increased student Teaming due to online use is further substantiated by teacher reports in telephone interviews.
A secondary focus of this study is on the effects of online use on teacher behavior and attitudes. Most teachers involved in the study had not previously integrated online use into their instruction. Many had not previously experienced online communications at all. In reviewing the results pertaining to teachers, it should be noted that comparisons between control and experimental teachers are based on much smaller numbers than the student comparisons and should be interpreted as trends, indicating further directions for analysis.
Results from the teacher questionnaires suggest that online use was positive for the teachers. Teachers in the experimental group appear to have increased their use of computers over the term of the study (as opposed to the controls who did not change); they reported increased learning for their students, wanted more computer resources and supports in their classrooms, and used the computers in their classrooms for increasingly higher-level activities.
It is interesting in this latter regard to note that teachers' and students' perceptions of the use of computers differed somewhat. The experimental teachers, not the students, reported that the largest increase over the study was in using the computers for gathering information a likely result from successful experience with online resources. The same teachers reported little increase in use of computers for basic skill acquisition, although the experimental students did. In contrast to the experimental teachers, the control teachers reported largest increases in computer use for basic skill development and for reward and reinforcement.
Although the small number of respondents limits the significance of these findings, they suggest that online use changed teachers' perceptions of the role of technology, and their own behavior in using it with their students. The direction of change for the experimental teachers was toward using technology in the way that literate adults use computers - to enhance performance directly, in gathering, organizing, and presenting information. The direction of change for control teachers was, from an educational standpoint, more traditional. They reported increased use of computers as teaching devices - turning to them for teaching basic skills, or for rewarding other kinds of skill development.
Finally, it is important to recognize a cluster of findings that suggest teachers were highly engaged as learners through online use. The learning went beyond using the online technology in itself. Teachers reported learning about new sources of information in general and specifically relating to the topic of Civil Rights. They learned from each other, from online resources, from CAST research staff, and from their students.
Teachers' engagement as learners came out in other ways as well. For example, questionnaires raised experimental teachers' concerns about building-based support. In contrast to control teachers, who reported increasing satisfaction with support from administrators and technology staff over the course of the study, the teachers with online access reported decreasing satisfaction. Because they were being challenged to learn how to do new things, they needed additional support and did not find existing supports sufficient. At its most positive, this is a problem of rising expectations. It is when apprentices begin to learn most that they require the most from their mentors.
There are many caveats in any study such as this. While a control group was included to help reduce various unintended experimental effects, the reality of school-based research intruded in several areas. For one thing, the assignment of classrooms to experimental and control conditions was not random, although that was the intent. Assignment of conditions was free of bias from the researchers, but school administrators who chose participating teachers may have unintentionally selected teachers in such a way that may have affected the results one way or the other. For another, the study was less than a year in length. Although the length of the unit of study was the same for control and experimental classes, the long-term positive effects of online use are untested in the present study and it is possible that these results are transitory. Lastly, various real-world problems intruded on the data collection and reduced the reliability of the conclusions. The teacher strike in one district, for example, clearly had an impact on the study. The small number of teachers in the study also limits the conclusions that can be safely drawn with regard to changes in teacher behavior and attitudes.
Nonetheless, this study represents an important step in investigating whether online use will lead to increased learning. In our world of rising demands for literacy, and particularly for literacy that extends beyond print literacy, we will need to engage both students and their teachers in becoming independent, critical thinkers. Students and teachers will need to become active learners who can find information, organize it, evaluate it, and then effectively express their knowledge and ideas. The results of this study suggest that online use can be an important tool for both.