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5
Research on New Learning Systems
In the committee's view, a significant increase in the
amount of effective learning time devoted to mathematics,
science, and technology will probably involve extensive
use of computers and telecommunications. In this chapter,
we discuss three targets for development that hold
promise for improving both the quality and the amount of
time devoted to education in mathematics, science, and
technology. There is, however, an important related
question about the application of modern technology to
education: if improperly used, it may aggravate rather
than relieve disparities among groups regarding their
knowledge about mathematics, science, and technology.
Surveys of computer use (Center for Social Organization
of Schools, 1983-1984) indicate that more computers are
being placed in the hands of middle- and upper-class
children than poor children; where computers are found in
the schools of poor children, they tend to be used for
rote drill and practice instead of the cognitive enrich-
ment that they provide for middle- and upper-class
students. In addition, female students have less involve-
ment with computers in schools, irrespective of class or
ethnicity, and this problem grows worse in secondary
school (Miura and Hess, 1983).
RESEARCH ON INTERACTIVE COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Computer microworlds provide new capabilities for
teaching science and technology because they make apparent
things that students usually cannot see (diSessai 1984).
For example, with the DYnaturtle program (diSessa, 1982
White, 1984), which models a universe obeying Newton's
laws, children try to control objects moving in a
39
;
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40
frictionless world and thus learn to reexamine their
intuitive notions about relationships between moving
bodies; in Steamer (Stevens and Roberts, 1983), the
student can see inside the pipes and boilers of a steam
plant that in the real world covers two huge rooms; in a
circuit simulation (White and Frederiksen, 1985), the
student can see how voltage changes depending on differ-
ent configurations of a circuit, because voltage is color
coded. More generally, it is possible to speed things
up, slow things down, provide microscopes and telescopes,
represent abstract properties, and reconfigure space in
ways that science laboratory experiments or demonstrations
ordinarily do less well.
Microworlds also create environments in which doing
mathematics and science makes sense to students, that is,
in which learning is intrinsically motivating (topper and
Greene, 1978; Lepper and Malone, in press). For example,
in Geography Search, groups of students sail off to the
New World to look for treasure. But as they sail, they
must compute their latitude and longitude and keep track
of their food and supplies so they don't run out before
returning home. In Ice Cream Price Wars (Collins, 1985),
groups of students run competitive ice cream stands, and
they must calculate how to make the most money and defend
their pricing strategies to other students in their
group.
At the same time, microworlds can be used to facilitate
active learning by using effective tutoring strategies.
As noted above, reasoning is hard to learn without active
work and without using an instructional system--a teacher,
peers, an interactive workbook, a computer system--that
provides suggestions and advice. Several promising lines
of research in developing tutoring strategies and prin-
ciples have been mentioned above, for example, Anderson's
set of principles (Anderson et al., 1985) in the domain
of geometry and the work of Reif and others in devising
strategies that guide learners in understanding problems
in physics. There are several computer-based prototypes
in this area (Burton and Brown, 1978; Anderson, 1981;
Sleeman and Brown, 1982; Anderson et al., 1983). Such
tutoring systems are not traditional computer-assisted
instruction that guides a learner through a lesson, but
rather systems that follow a learner's reasoning processes
and give advice when the learner is working unproduc-
tively. m us, they seem to improve the use of time by
intervening when the learner has reached an impasse and
is engaging in a long, frustrating, and unproductive
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41
sequence of work. However, much remains to be learned
about when and how to intervene so as to make the tutoring
maximally effective.
Further understanding of how computer-based microworlds
and tutoring systems should be designed to enhance mathe-
matics and science learning requires the development of
pilots to serve as experimental settings for the testing
of alternatives.
The committee therefore recommends a systematic program
for the development of pilot educational systems using
computers to create microworlds and tutoring strategies
that engage learners in science- and mathematics-linked
tasks and thereby advance both the acquisition of
knowledge and the learning of reasoning and problem-
solving skills.
RESEARCH ON MICROSYSTEMS
Research reviewed earlier in this report and in the
report of a subgroup on noncognitive factors in education
(Cole, 1985) makes it evident that coordinated attention
should be given to a category of activities that, for
lack of a better term, might be called Microsystems
research. Microsystems research is distinguished from
the microworlds approach discussed in the preceding
section in that it explicitly concerns itself simultane-
ously with the curriculum content and the social organi-
zation of instruction. Three kinds of Microsystems are
of special interest: within-classroom activity centers,
community-based after-school centers, and mixed insti-
tutional structures.
Successful methods of classroom instruction frequently
involve breaking classes into smaller activity groups
that combine theoretical understanding with hands-on
familiarity. Unfortunately, these conditions have been
maintained only in hothouse environments (Moll and Diaz,
1982; Hawkins and Sheingold, 1983; Goodlad, 1984;
Peterson et al., 1984). One reason may be that the
simultaneous effects of such contributory factors as
materials production, school organization, teacher
training, and small group dynamics--especially the
question of group heterogeneity discussed earlier--are
not well understood. Even programs with demonstrated
success, such as the activity-based elementary school
curricula of the 1960s, currently languish in obscure
places and end up being used only because individual
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42
teachers make heroic efforts or an especially well
educated parent group creates a demand.
We recommend research on how to create hardy
-
varieties of effective activity-based instructional
systems for mathematics and science education so that
they will be taken up and institutionalized in a wide
variety of school systems.
There is agreement that more time on task is needed
for American students, but the public's willingness to
expand the school day or the school year is limited.
Assigning homework is an unsatisfactory amplifying
technique because those students who need it most tend to
get the least effective support outside school. It may
be time for a significant experiment in organizing
educational after-school activities for children, using
such settings as community centers, churches, libraries,
and the school facilities themselves. A variety of
prototypes that suggest the range of possible activities
and institutional arrangements already exist (Mall and
Diaz, 1982; Woodson, 1982). What does not exist is an
overall understanding of the potential and limitations of
such activities. Research should be designed to exploit
the potential and discover the limitations of various
forms of after-school activity centers through the
development and evaluation of several pilot models.
One promising model is offered by San Diego's Community
Resource and Research Center (Diaz, 1984). Children from
two minority group communities go to local centers to
practice basic skills in the process of becoming ~com-
munications experts. or Computer experts.. Each center
resembles within-classroom activity centers, raised to
the level of a community educational setting; each center
involves children in an interlocking set of interesting
activities with microcomputers (including computer-based
message systems) as part of the mix. The centers require
that parents take initiative to enroll their children,
and the children must sign a contract promising to become
expert enough to teach others in their
community--starting at home.
Systems that cross institutional boundaries such as
school-community programs and school-museum programs
(Fantini and Sinclair, 1985) also hold promise for
mathematics and science education. The American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 1984)
summarized a large number of exemplary educational
programs serving women and minorities; it is clear from
the report that much informal knowledge has been gained
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43
from practical experience on how to create educational
programs that are successful with these populations.
Many of the programs exhibit a key structural property:
they create a system of education that is integrated both
vertically (from early education through later years) and
horizontally (they coordinate and draw support from a
range of departments/institutions/bureaucracies). For
example, the Community Educational Resource and Research
Center of the University of California, San Diego, brings
adults, college students, and high school students into a
single activity setting after school, creating vertical
integration. Horizontal integration is achieved by
involving multiple parties responsible for some part of
children's education:
the community.
m e problem with such systems, even when they are
demonstrated successes, is that they are difficult to fit
into existing bureaucratic arrangements. AS the AAAS
report notes, demonstrations of success based upon short-
term funding of experiments does not insure uptake within
the originally sponsoring institutions. Innovative
educational successes have had long-term social failure
built into them (AAAS, 1984; Stage et al., 1985). This
history suggests a requirement for sophisticated systems
analysis on how to create mixed institutional systems for
mathematics and science education that are sustained
rather than diminished by bureaucratic and social
structures.
the university, the school system,
DEVELOPING A SYSTEMS APPROACH TO
IMPROVING MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
Education is a major industry with a minor research
and development activity. Expenditures for education
amounted to $226.5 billion (S136.5 billion for elementary
and secondary schools) in 1983 (U.S. Department of Com-
merce, 1984), while investment in educational research
and development was less than one-tenth of one percent of
that amount (National Science Foundation, 1985). This
contrasts to national defense and health, in which
research and development represent 15 percent and about 2
percent of total expenditures, respectively. Industry
investment of its own funds in research and development
averages 2.6 percent of net sales, with highs of 7-10
percent in industries concerned with the manufacture of
drugs, computers, and communication equipment (National
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44
Science Foundation, 1982). Even the lowest-investing
industries, foods and textiles, spend four to five times
as much on research and development as does education.
Moreover, this large, complicated, and subtle enterprise
has almost no systematic approach for applying new
knowledge and technology to the design of better learning
situations (Raizen, 1979~.
There is irony in the circumstance that the transfer -
and use of knowledge from the mathematical and scientific
disciplines, through the evolution of agricultural,
medical, and engineering schools and of industrial and
governmental development centers and laboratories, has
led to the economic and technological advancement of the
United States and improved health for its citizens, yet
the transfer of information about the teaching and
learning of mathematics, science, and technology has been
severely limited. More is known than is used.
As the committee's review indicates, the past decades
have seen a cumulation of knowledge from several per-
tinent disciplines and the development of new technol-
ogies, but application to science and mathematics
education, as to all education, has been episodic,
unsystematic, and limited in scope. A new approach is
needed, one that combines the changes taking place in
mathematics and the sciences with new knowledge about
human learning capabilities and different learning
settings, at the same time taking advantage of the
potential of computers and related information tech-
nology. At present, there is no mechanism to serve the
function of integrating the new knowledge and technology
deriving from different sources and applying them to the
development of improved systems for the teaching and
learning of mathematics, science, and technology.
In other enterprises, this integrative function has
been called systems design and engineering. The term
probably originated in the telecommunications community,
was continued and expanded in the aerospace industry, and
has since been widely used wherever it has been recognized
that proper design involves more than just assembling
various components that have been developed in isolation.
Designing components to function optimally for overall
improvement of a system requires that the properties of
the system and the functioning of each component must be
considered as an entirety before individual components
are reconfigured.
Modern educational activities, too, should be
considered a system in which improvement of components in
.,
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45
isolation may not lead to improvement of the overall
system. The various components that make up the system
of educational activities are common to all subjects and
levels and are schematically represented in Figure 2. Of
the major components illustrated, the area of technology
is changing most rapidly, under the impact of current
developments in computers, displays, interactive input-
output devices, and communications and storage networks.
New techniques for improving cognitive development,
motivation, communication, and instructional processes
have also evolved rapidly, as researchers into the
fundamental aspects of these human faculties and
behaviors gain knowledge that can be employed in
developing teaching and learning methodologies. With
respect to the content areas of precollege education,
probably none is developing more quickly than mathematics
and the sciences. University researchers, responding to
the needs of the marketplace and the government, to the
advent of new technology that makes possible qualitatively
different research, and to the most basic drive for
inquiry--the need to understand--are developing new facts
and techniques that must be transmitted to new generations
of students if they are to be as productive as possible
in engineering, medicine, economics, agriculture, and the
many other fields pertinent to human advancement. The
rapid advances in technology, cognitive science, and
science and mathematics knowledge present new oppor-
tunities for improving the system, but only if mechanisms
can be developed that would facilitate the integrated
application of these advances to education.
There is an important and instructive lesson for
education in the history of systems engineering for the
communications and aerospace industries. Although
systems engineering has become a discipline in itself, it
is significant that even now university programs devoted
to communications and aerospace do very little research
in systems integration engineering for these technologies
Papers that appear in the literature in this field are
largely the result of the efforts of scientists and
engineers in industrial companies and independent
research laboratories devoted to communications or
aerospace, that is, organizations closer to the end
product and its users. For education, too, more is
needed than the existing university-based research
activities.
It is not enough that mathematics and science content
or the theories underlying the development of displays,
.
OCR for page 46
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computers, communications equipment, and associated
software are the subject of university research. Nor is
it sufficient that new knowledge is being uncovered about
the cognitive processes and social structures underlying
teaching and learning methodology and that curriculum
development and the application of computer information
systems to education are taking place. There remains a
strong need to bring together researchers from all these
and associated fields--mathematics, the physical and
biological sciences, psychology, sociology, anthropology,
and information sciences, among others--who have an
interest in and dedication to integrating these various
components into educational systems. It is important for
such individuals to work with creative school adminis-
trators, curriculum developers, and teachers to design
more effective learning structures. Examples from other
fields also suggest that the success of such an endeavor
requires an environment in which innovative approaches
can make use of the latest output from the content,
-methodology, and technology areas and can be tested in
realistic settings--that is, in classrooms, schools, and
school systems.
The idea of developing mechanisms equivalent to
systems design and engineering in education is attrac-
tive, although the limited successes of such an approach
with systems involving political, social, and behavioral
(as well as technical) elements are warnings against
excessive expectations of success. It is arguable that
evolving combinations of market, political, and bureau-
cratic structures provide the best means for achieving
effective education, better than is achievable through
deliberate planning of a systemic sort. The committee is
sensitive to the limitations in the social arena of
systems design and engineering adapted from industries
based on highly developed technologies, yet there remains
the need to design each single component in concert with
the other components of the educational system.
There may be several ways of accomplishing this
integrative function. One that has proved effective in
other fields is a free-standing entity different from any
that currently exists in that it would use a systems
approach to educational improvements rather than retrofit
individual pieces, such as a new curriculum or an inno-
vative form of classroom organization, into structures
that may or may not be able to accommodate them success-
fully. Whatever the mechanism, the following character-
istics are seen as essential to the integrative function:
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48
(1) Because the anticipated work needs to draw on
developments in several fast-moving fields, the setting
must be able to attract researchers from the scholarly
disciplines within the natural, behavioral, and social
sciences as well as engineering and technological experts
and creative educational researchers, developers, and
practitioners.
{2) Interdisciplinary terms should be used to design,
develop, and test comprehensive teaching and learning
models in science and mathematics, taking advantage of
the most advanced research and technologies.
(3) Experiments and findings arising from local
school operations need to be assessed and extended--for
example, practices from schools that consistently produce
Westinghouse National Talent Search winners and results
of state initiatives such as those going forward in
Arizona, California, New Jersey, North Carolina,
Tennessee, and Texas.
(4) Connections with schools must be established so
that new educational models can be evaluated in the
reality of the classroom and effective implementation
strategies for widespread use of successful innovations
can be developed.
tS) An efficient communications network is necessary
through which administrators, teachers, university
faculty, book publishers, and public bodies can keep in
touch and collaborate with important findings and
developments, possibly through an electronic/photonic
network tied into the communications common carriers.
The design of an institution or mechanism with the
capacities to integrate new knowledge and developments
from disparate fields and apply them to educational
improvement in a systemic manner is a complex undertaking
Characteristics of the new entity must be defined; means
must be found for establishing it so as to embody the
desired characteristics; relationships with existing
institutions that are crucial to its mission or appear
already to perform certain parts of it must be worked
out. For example, some questions that need to be
addressed in the formulation include:
· How should the integrative institution or
mechanism be organized so as to be buffered from the
pressures exerted on and by existing hierarchial
structures in education, yet enable it to work
effectively with both schools and institutions of higher
education?
.
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49
.
What kinds of staffing patterns would encourage
constant regeneration of innovative approaches--e.g.,
balance between permanent staff and short-term visiting
researchers and practitioners in the mathematics/science/
education fields, or opportunities for young researchers
to work with senior scholars?
· What size and structure of budget would be
needed, and what would be appropriate funding sources--
federal, private foundations, states and large school
districts, consortia of industries that provide new
equipment in the computer/communications fields, or, more
likely, a mixture of several of such sources?
~ What kinds of linkages need to be created to
schools to ensure that effective classroom practice
becomes part of the store of knowledge going into
improvement efforts, that newly developed learning and
teaching models undergo realistic testing, and that
effective models are widely adopted and appropriately
implemented?
· What kinds of linkages need to be created with
the many institutional entities that produce relevant
knowledge, develop alternative educational components,
and work with schools and teachers? Examples of such
entities include mathematics, science, and engineering
departments, behavioral and social science departments,
and schools and departments of education in institutions
of higher education; research centers and regional
laboratories supported by the Department of Education;
state education authorities and various state subunits
providing services to schools; and the textbook and
computer hardware and software industries.
· What institutions or organizations exist in other
social service fields that might provide instructive
guidance for developing a systems approach to improving
mathematics and science education? Would it be useful,
for example, to assess the successes and failures of the
Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (see the MDRC
Annual Report, 1984), which is concerned with developing
and testing a variety of employment programs, or the
Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health,
which brings scientists and clinicians together for
studies of specific diseases?
In sum, the committee finds that current efforts to
improve mathematics, science, and technology education
take a piecemeal approach rather than integrating
available knowledge and technology. Therefore, we
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50
recommend a serious effort to design appropriate models
for education analogous to systems design and engineering
institutions in other fields that would use a systems
approach in applying pertinent research and development
to overall educational improvement. As a necessary first
step, we recommend that the Department of Education, in
concert with the National Science Foundation, convene a
task force or similar group to think through the best
means for carrying out the integrative and systems design
function that is missing in current efforts to improve
education, including consideration of such issues as
organization, staffing, budgets, and linkages to other
institutions.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
microsystems research
