Enhancing the Art & Science of Teaching With Technology. Robert J. Marzano
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Iliana Snyder (1998) wrote that “no technology … can guarantee any particular change in cultural practices simply by its ‘nature’” (p. 140), and Robert Branch and Christa Deissler (2008) agreed that “the use of technology merely for technology’s sake is ineffective and often a misuse of resources” (p. 210). Technology, it seems, cannot yield achievement gains in a vacuum. Technology, on its own, is not enough.
The Value-Neutral Lens
Theorists who see technology through a value-neutral lens attempt to reconcile competing value-positive and value-negative arguments to create a third viewpoint. They concede that both value-positive and value-negative theorists make valuable points. For instance, Collins and Halverson (2009) stated, “We think that the skeptics are correct in that there are deep incompatibilities between technology and schooling but that the enthusiasts are correct in that education must change to stay relevant in the wake of the Knowledge Revolution” (p. 7). Educational technology may not have revolutionized and transformed education, such theorists admit, but that does not mean it has no place in a classroom. Despite an unrealized technological miracle, Culp and her colleagues (2005) described the preceding two decades’ increases in technological infrastructure—including a move to widespread computer and Internet access in public schools—as “major accomplishments” (p. 299).
Rather than endorsing or openly rejecting the potential of educational technology, Harris (2005) distinguished between using technology and using technology well. She encouraged educational technologists to modify the value-positive view of technology as a vehicle for education reform in favor of a more neutral view of technology integration. Harris defined technology integration simply as “the pervasive and productive use of educational technologies for purposes of learning and teaching” (p. 119). She wrote:
I urge us to consider seriously whether it is more appropriate to try to change the nature of teaching and learning through the integration of educational technologies—or to help teachers and learners use appropriate curriculum-based technological applications more pervasively in all their varied forms. (p. 121)
Rather than viewing the lackluster results from technology-fueled reform efforts as failures, Culp and her colleagues (2005) were optimistic about the gradual increase in technology use. They believed it allowed educational technology advocates to “understand with more nuance that technology needs to work in concert with other factors like effective leadership, instructional priorities, and the day-to-day demands of classroom practice” (p. 303).
Punya Mishra, Matthew Koehler, and Kristen Kereluik (2009) agreed that, due to the belief that technology would rescue education, “most innovations have focused inordinately on the technology rather than more fundamental issues of how to approach teaching subject matter with these technologies” (p. 49). Mishra and his colleagues (2009) summarized the value-neutral perspective well: “If technology is truly to be beneficial to education, the power and potential of educational technology must be acknowledged to reside within educators and not within objects” (p. 52).
Our Perspective in This Book
For the most part, our perspective in this book is that educational technology has a slight tendency toward being value positive. We believe that when considered as a whole, the aforementioned categories of educational technology use—computers, the Internet, interactive whiteboards, and mobile devices—will produce a slight positive effect on student learning. However, when combined with effective use of specific instructional strategies, the positive effects on student learning are greater than the effect of the technology used in isolation or the instructional strategies used in isolation. To use a well-worn phrase, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Both authors of this book have had concrete experience to this end.
As mentioned previously, Marzano Research (since renamed Marzano Resources) conducted a series of studies on the effects of IWBs on student achievement (Marzano & Haystead, 2009, 2010). These studies involved over 130 teachers who used IWB technology with one group of students and IWB-free methods with a second group of students. In both classes, teachers took the same amount of time to teach the same content and used the same assessments to measure student growth and learning. However, in one class, they used IWB technology and in the other they didn’t. The overall effect size for the use of IWBs was 0.37, which translates into a 14 percentile point gain. This finding would seem to support the notion that the use of a specific type of educational technology, in this case the use of interactive whiteboards, has a moderate positive effect on student learning. However, when video recordings of the teachers were analyzed to see how well they used specific instructional strategies—such as chunking content, scaffolding information, and monitoring student progress—the researchers found a strong relationship between the execution of the strategies and the effect of IWB usage on student achievement. Specifically, when teachers used IWB technology and executed strategies well, the effect size was 1.60, indicating a 45 percentile point gain. The average effect of these strategies without IWB technology has been shown to be about 0.64, indicating a 24 percentile point gain. Essentially, the combined effect of IWB technology and the effective execution of instructional strategies was greater than the independent effect of either variable in isolation.
One School’s Experience
Action research was conducted in an elementary school in California to examine the use of technology to support or enhance specific instructional strategies (Haystead & Magaña, 2013). This low-performing elementary school served a very diverse, high-needs population of students. Most of the students attending this school lived at or below the poverty level and qualified for the free or reduced lunch program. Nearly half of the students in the school were English learners, and many were considered highly mobile, meaning they had changed their place of residence at least twice during an academic year. Prior to the introduction of technology professional development and tools in 2009, the school had failed to attain adequate yearly progress, as measured by the California Academic Performance Index (API), for five consecutive years. Student behavior and attendance issues were also major concerns in this school.
Beginning in the 2009–2010 academic year, the school received focused professional development about using their existing technology tools to support specific instructional strategies. The teachers and the school instructional coach were trained to use IWBs, IWB software, and student response systems in combination with effective instructional strategies (such as previewing, chunking, scaffolding, pacing, monitoring student progress, identifying similarities and differences, using nonlinguistic representations, and using questioning strategies).
As described previously, the school had failed to meet API standards for five years before the beginning of the study. In 2010, however, the school received a Growth API score of 804, achieving adequate yearly progress for the first time. This was followed by two more years of growth. Furthermore, the school outperformed the median Growth API score, which includes one hundred other California schools with similar demographic characteristics (for example, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, English learner population, and so on). Figure 1.3 compares this school’s API scores with the median Growth API scores from 2004 to 2012.
Figure 1.3: Comparison of median academic growth and growth of the test school as measured by the California API.
Source: Haystead & Magaña, 2013, p. 8.
The percentage of students in the school achieving proficient or advanced levels of achievement in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics