displays produced lower overall reasoning performance, and also increased the amount of time it took to solve the problems relative to a full-size display. This suggests that while factual information gathering is unaffected when done [on] a small device, reasoning performance is negatively affected when done on a small device. (p. 796)
These results indicate that reading scrolling text or text on a small screen may have negative effects on students’ comprehension and reasoning abilities.
Student Response Systems
A student response system, often called a clicker, is a small, handheld mobile device that allows students to respond to teacher questions in real time. The students’ responses are then “immediately displayed on a screen for all to see (usually in the form of a graph), allowing students to receive corrective feedback on their answer as well as compare their answer to peers’ answers” (Blood & Gulchak, 2013, p. 246). While there are several competing clicker devices and corresponding software systems available for purchase, a number of websites—such as Poll Everywhere and Socrative—offer free services that can be used with smartphones or other mobile devices.
As described by Steven Ross, Gary Morrison, and Deborah Lowther (2010), some instructional advantages of clickers include: “(a) valuable immediate review and feedback for students, (b) immediate data on student progress for teachers to examine and use as a basis for making instructional adaptations, and (c) high engagement and interactivity by students during teacher-led instruction” (p. 21). The capacity of clickers to “give students frequent, integral access to new representational forms and communication options” has the potential to “enable students to better express what they know and can do,” which could make clickers useful for formative assessment (Roschelle, Penuel, Yarnall, Shechtman, & Tatar, 2004, p. 5). Clickers have also been found to increase student engagement (Bojinova & Oigara, 2011).
Perspectives on Educational Technology
As research on the impacts of educational technology expands, numerous theories and perspectives have emerged regarding the general utility of educational technology. One perspective views technology through a value-positive lens, meaning technology has the capacity to constructively transform education. The value-positive approach maintains that, when used for education, technology will almost always have a positive effect, regardless of other variables. A conclusion typically following this viewpoint is that schools can improve the achievement of their students by increasing their usage of technology as quickly as possible.
A second perspective views technology through a value-negative lens, meaning that technology cannot impact teaching and learning in any positive way and does not belong in the classroom. These theorists often allege that technology is a waste of time, money, and public policy initiative, since the same achievement goals can be accomplished with and without technology.
A third perspective views educational technology as value-neutral, meaning that technology is neither inherently good nor inherently bad by its nature but is only as beneficial as the teaching practices it enhances. When used in tandem with effective instructional practices, technology is likely to have a number of positive impacts in the classroom including gains in student achievement, engagement, and motivation. We consider each perspective briefly.
The Value-Positive Lens
The rise of educational technology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries resulted in a call for transformational change in U.S. public policy. In their review of twenty years of educational technology policy, Katie Culp, Margaret Honey, and Ellen Mandinach (2005) wrote:
In 1995 the tone of policy reports changes noticeably. In part this is a response to the emergence of the Internet as a major force driving changes in business, civic life and, to some extent, education. During this period, policy reports begin to present education technology as a driver of school reform, rather than as a class of tools and resources that, to varying extents, could be matched to educational challenges already recognized by educators. In these reports technology becomes a tool of transformation, which promised, simply by its presence and capabilities, to cause changes in how teachers teach, how schools are organized, and how students work together and learn. (p. 301)
These policy changes reflect a value-positive view of educational technology. Initial expressions of the value-positive view took place prior to the advent of the Internet, however. In 1980, educational technology advocate Seymour Papert published the first edition of Mindstorms, his groundbreaking book about the first student-friendly computer programming language. Papert (1993) theorized that this computer language—called LOGO—would help students learn mathematics “in a context which is to learning mathematics what living in France is to learning French” (p. 6). Papert made two central claims in Mindstorms: (1) children can learn to master computer skills, and (2) once children learn to use computers, it will change the way they learn everything else. The second claim, that computers would fundamentally revolutionize the way children learn, inspired many efforts to put computers into children’s hands, including the aforementioned OLPC initiative, with which Papert was principally involved. OLPC founding members also included Google, eBay, Quanta, Red Hat, and Marvell. Partners of the nonprofit include companies such as Citigroup, Pentagram, Underwriters Laboratories, United Nations Development Program, Foley Hoag, and fuseproject. By 2013, more than two million students and teachers in the developing world had received OLPC’s patented XO laptop, despite little to no research in support of its effectiveness (Cristia et al., 2012). These organizations share the common perspective that technology has the power to fundamentally and positively change the way children think and learn.
The Value-Negative Lens
Retrospective analyses reveal that value-positive conjectures may have been overly optimistic. Educational technology, it seems, has not revolutionized education, at least to the extent originally imagined. Judi Harris (2005) commented, “Despite more than two decades of effort, technology as ‘Trojan horse’ for educational reform has succeeded in only a minority of K–12 contexts” (p. 120), and Richard Noeth and Boris Volkov (2004) stated that “despite schools flooded with computers, the evidence is mixed as to whether overall student achievement has notably increased or the achievement gap has visibly narrowed as a result” (p. 7). The U.S. Department of Education (2004) lamented, “We have not realized the promise of technology in education.… Computers, instead of transforming education, were often shunted to a ‘computer room,’ where they were little used and poorly maintained” (p. 10). In a policy review, Culp and her colleagues (2005) observed that “education technology experts, who have largely been responsible for guiding and informing policymakers’ understandings of the potential role of technology in education over the past 20 years, have provided energizing, exciting visions of how technology could potentially ‘change everything’” (pp. 302–303). However, they noted that the technological uses policymakers and researchers hoped for are not yet reflected in widespread instructional practice: “What begins to surface in these policy documents is a widening gap between the promise and potential of technology and the ways in which technology actually gains traction in school settings” (p. 302).
Indeed, qualitative data show that most teachers use new forms of technology primarily to accomplish the same tasks they were already accomplishing (such as lesson planning, information presentation, and personal productivity) rather than to restructure their practice to facilitate higher-order thinking skills (Culp et al., 2005; Ottenbreit-Leftwich et al., 2012). Furthermore, when teachers do make changes to their practice, technology is not the primary catalyst for those changes (Dexter et al., 1999). Research by Dexter and her colleagues (1999) illustrated that:
The primary reason [for change in instructional practice] was of internal origin and agency: Change was the consequence of reflecting on teaching practice, its goals, and its efficacy.… [Teachers
