Melissa Matusevich
Keith Rowland
Montgomery County Public Schools, VA
January 5, 1996
Network-based computing technology has provided strong hope for K-12 educational reform; however, the Benton Foundation estimates that only 3% of all US classrooms even have Internet access. There is almost no information about how the Internet is used in these classrooms, and almost nothing is known about the effect of network access on student achievement under the best of circumstances.
We propose a 3-year longitudinal study of the effect of a stimulating and carefully designed constructivist network-based curriculum to be implemented in the context of a networked rural community. The curriculum will be designed to require substantial parental involvement and major changes in the relationships among the participants in the educational process. Networking will support education by strengthening families.
The proposed curriculum is aimed at 5th grade, and a study is to be made of both parents and students as the students progress through the first two years of middle school on their own, armed with the best networked computing capabilities and learning methodology we can reasonably provide.
With National Science Foundation (NIE) and Department of Commerce (TIIAP/NTIA) support, Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia and the Montgomery County Schools have been national leaders in the application of networking technologies in primary education (http://www.bev.net/education/schools/index.html). Montgomery County is a rural Appalachian county with diverse demographics, including many nationally prominent scientists and educators on the one hand and significant problems with illiteracy and poverty on the other. However, it also has two unparalleled resources that make it an ideal national testbed...Virginia Tech and the Blacksburg Electronic Village (known as BEV), the nation's premier community network (http://www.bev.net).
The PCs for Families Program is an innovative program at Riner Elementary School in Montgomery County, Virginia whose goal is to bring new and dramatically different educational opportunities to rural students and their families. In this pilot program, a computer is to be purchased for each student in a 5th grade class and configured with a networking suite and camera. When plugged in at home, these computers will connect the students with each other, with the schools and teachers, with the community, and with the worldwide information resources of the Internet.
In a careful study we will track the effects of this resource on student achievement for a period of up to five years. We will determine whether we can make substantial improvements in the social relationships important to the educational process and give the students a new perspective on their citizenship in a world information society. Moreover, the results of this study will be fundamental to major decisions about the future of technology in the schools, not only in Montgomery County, but nationally. The national significance is substantial. As society becomes acculturated to technology as part of everyday life, the impact upon public education will be enormous. It is probable that greater changes will occur in public schools than at any time in the past two hundred years. Our goal is to investigate what these changes will be and the financial and educational implications for the schools of tomorrow.
Besides the obvious goal of offering Internet-grade communication capabilities to all county residents, BEV seeks to change the social relationships among all the parties in the BEV community. First of all, BEV has become an important information provider for the community, linking together the information resources of local government, Virginia Tech, and area businesses. In the past year, however, the major focus of BEV has been on education. Major efforts are being made not only to utilize networking technologies to change the quality and breadth of county K-12 education, but to build a stronger collaborative relationship among all the parties in the educational process...the schools, the teachers, the students, the libraries, and certainly the parents.
In September 1994, the Computer Science Department and the College of Education at Virginia Tech received a planning grant from the National Science Foundation titled, Planning for a Virtual School in the Blacksburg Electronic Village. This project, which was cosponsored by Bell Atlantic, Scholastic Network, and Busch Entertainment, provided the resources for computer scientists and educators at Virginia Tech to work together with county school administrators and a group of talented and dedicated teachers to plan a superior long-term educational future for the Montgomery County. Since the beginning of this project, school administrators and teachers have been introduced to networking technologies and have even begun authoring lesson plans on the World Wide Web (http://pixel.cs.vt.edu/melissa/projects.html). As part of the planning process there has been a continuing participatory design cycle of education, synthesis, and discussion that has led to a broad plan for system-wide educational reform that is the basis for new funding requests.
In addition to these planning activities, a number of research projects have been initiated between individual university researchers and teachers to experiment with and evaluate certain network-based technologies, such as video-based collaboration through CU-See Me, a widely distributed program from Cornell University. This has been filmed by Disney Productions and viewed nationally. The Computer Science Department has also received substantial funding to pioneer major improvements to current network-based services by creating new collaborative technologies for the enhancement of education.
Most technology efforts are focused on older students because that seems to simplify many pedagogical issues and because many technology efforts focus on math and science. We believe, however, that younger students can thrive in this vastly richer environment. We want to work with younger students to ensure that by the time they reach middle school they are fully integrated into a networked world. By doing this we hope to make middle school a more stimulating intellectual experience than it is for most students.
The quality of and easy access to networking in Montgomery County makes this an ideal environment in which to organize a pilot project involving the networking of the families of an entire elementary school class. Since the schools in Montgomery County are largely Appalachian, there are problems that we may face in bringing this project to reality. Some families may be semi-literate, and these will require special attention. Some families may not have telephones; others may have philosophical objections to having a computer in the home. In this area, parents may have religious objections because of the unexpected documents a child might encounter while working on a global network. We are not quite sure what will happen.
Constructivist methodology has not been widely implemented in the nation's schools because it requires completely different techniques that can challenge even the best among teachers. Technology is integrated into instruction; it is not an add-on (Strommen, 1992). The best teachers, however, will shift naturally to constructivist methodology; in fact, in a technology-rich classroom, constructivist methodology will be forced naturally into play (Collins, 1991). Teachers function as educational guides rather than as fact purveyors, and lessons are dynamic and require constant updating to direct the students to their educational goals. As a consequence, we recognize that merely providing technology to a school normally results only in automating the existing educational process. Unfortunately there is great resistance to technology-based reform in an existing school system (Hodas, 1993).
Another rationale for students using networking is the problem caused when textbooks are the basis of classroom instruction. With textbooks being used a minimum of six years in Virginia, it is highly likely that most students are being taught from books which are neither current nor accurate (Larkins and Hawkins, 1990; Sewall, 1987). As an example, the fifth grade social studies textbook used in Montgomery County Schools is poorly written, contains incorrect maps and historical inaccuracies. 66% of all fifth graders in America use this book, highlighting a problem of national significance. Science textbooks are also incorrect in that much new information about the solar system has been discovered since the books were published many years ago. Networking affords students the opportunity to have at their fingertips the latest information in any subject area. As information continues to expand at exponential rates, students are able to access it while it is relevant. Thus, when a comet impacts Jupiter or a volcano erupts in New Zealand, students can witness the events as they occur, years before they will appear in any textbook.
We wish to emphasize that we are creating a unique classroom rather than a laboratory, in which networked resources are continuously available during the entire school day. There is no comparable classroom in the Montgomery County School System and probably few in the country.
It should be noted that the students in this heterogeneously grouped classroom have been selected at random making the demographics equivalent to any other fifth grade at Riner Elementary. Each participating family will sign an agreement that sets forth participation and performance requirments for the study period. Those parents who follow through for the three year period will be given the computers at the end of the project for their children to use as they enter high school.
Families will be grouped according to their capabilities and given network-ready computers at a series of training sessions that they attend with their children. In some cases this may require making home visits, giving supplementary assistance, or even specially designed technology training classes. Each computer will run Microsoft Office, a networking suite, drawing and graphics tools, and basic references on CDRom.
The teacher will be shown how to author and maintain comprehensive class World Wide Web pages; a graduate student will provide the necessary support. Each student will also have a server account and personal WWW pages. In establishing these pages, every effort will be made to engage the parents directly in their children's education because in the belief that this is a crucial educational issue. We are counting on networking to help achieve this goal. Thereafter, various class-oriented networking applications will be phased in. These will include the following:
The 5th grade curriculum will be otherwise identical to that prescribed by the Virginia Standards of Learning document, including the newly introduced computer literacy requirements.
Classroom structure will differ greatly from what is often perceived as the "average fifth grade classroom." Student questions and interest will drive investigations into topics related to the required curriculum. Rather than reading and discussing turgid textbooks, students will be dynamically involved throughout the day pursuing these topics electronically. Information from the World Wide Web will be downloaded. Questions will be posted on newsgroups. Students will directly communicate with experts in the field via email or CU-SeeMe connections. By allowing students to access information on the World Wide Web, we have a superb opportunity to introduce students to modern library organizations, especially to digital libraries and the concept of full text retrieval.
After information has been gathered, students will create presentations to share with other class members via Hypercard stacks or Power Point slide shows. Student work will be posted electronically for peer review from remote sites. Students will also regularly give public presentations to a real world audience which will include parents, administrators, other classrooms, PTAs, the School Board, and the Board of Supervisors.
It is likely that two or more students will naturally collaborate on a project. In addition, some students might teach other students the intricacies of a software package which they have learned from Ms. Ramsey, the aide, or from their own investigations. It is highly probable that Ms. Hood will work with a group of students for remediation while Ms. Ramsey works with another group teaching them a new application. At all times students will be active learners rather than passive vessels to be filled with knowledge imparted to them by the teacher.
In addition, with technological capabilities at the home, students will work on their projects in the evenings and on weekends, collaborating virtually if needed. The classroom library of CD-ROMs will allow students to check out information for home use.
Required intensive training sessions will be held for students and parents so that parents will be actively involved in their children's education. It is our intention that parents monitor their children's use of the computer and information resources, giving assistance as needed. Parents will be given the opportunity to volunteer in the classroom to assist as needed or to learn to use classroom resources to improve their own utilization of modern technology.
Another facet of this project will be the operation of an after-school program three days a week. The classroom aide will plan and manage a computer club after school. This club will be open to any student in grades K-5 who would like to have opportunities to become computer literate and to learn applications of information technologies. With assistance from graduate students in the computer science department of Virginia Tech, the facilitator will teach children how to use software, hardware, and the Internet.
Through this process we wish to answer a number of important questions:
Logs will be kept of all events that occur each school day including classroom progress and all interactions with the parents. These logs will be maintained by Ms. Ramsey, Ms. Hood, and the student assistants. All email to and from project personnel will be archived, subject to normal confidentiality considerations. The List-server logs will be archived and analyzed to determine whether or not the families who need the For Help listserve most will use it. This is a way of detecting intimidation. Special attention will be given to what human-computer interaction specialists call critical incidents, events positive or negative that stand out above routine expectations and which may be indicators of special successes or failures in the program.
We have both qualitative and quantitative educational issues to evaluate. Those questions listed in the previous section will be evaluated through surveys, interviews, meetings, and personal observation. The primary quantitative issue is student achievement, and this will be assessed through formal testing with standardized test instruments.
First we will survey the families of this fifth grade class to determine the demographics, the capabilities of the families, their attitudes toward computing and networking, and the extent of their involvement in their children's education. Data providing profiles of student attitudes about school, attendance, etc., will also be collected.
The Montgomery County Public School system already does extensive testing that will facilitate our achievement studies. The Cognitive Abilities Test (COGAT) is given in grades 1,3, and 5, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) is given in grades, 2,3,4,5,7,9, and 11, and the Virginia Literacy Passport is given in grade 6. Other nationally standardized tests are under discussion that may be even more helpful. Since MCPS students also take the 4th grade reading and writing predictors, we will compare the results on this assessment with the Literacy Passport Test given in sixth grade. Where applicable, siblings of the 5th grade students will also be tracked to see if residual effects of the program can be detected in them as well.
Besides considering class-wide student achievement, there are other issues of considerable interest to us. For example, since we will identify family achievement levels early in the study, we would like to compare performance of students from high and low achievement families initially and after three years to see if disparities have narrowed.
Recently Virginia Tech psychologist Robert J. Harvey has discovered that the MCPS students scoring in the top 25% on the COGAT test (the top 40% of MCPS students) are performing a year behind in 7th grade on the ITBS. This has stimulated considerable discussion and concern within the school system, and we will be consulting with Dr. Harvey to determine whether students in the PCs for Families program do demonstrably better.
We are confident that achievement of those in the PCs for Families program will be much higher than those not in the program; indeed it would be catastrophic to national trends and aspirations if the program produced even equivocal results. For this reason we will be keeping meticulous records so that the conditions of the experiments and progress of events can be closely examined if the expected results are not achieved.
The compelling work by Hodas on technology refusal (Hodas, 1993) warns us that technology-based reform will not be easy due to organizational momentum. If nothing else, it will surely be expensive. Before we embark on a national K-12 technology initiative, we had better understand the potential results and the costs. One must also deal with the reality of expecting teachers nationally to change their teaching methodology from that which they were taught to a constructivist mode. There will surely be a message here to the education programs across the country.
Another expectation is that the achievement gap between the strongest and weakest students will narrow. Again, standardized test results will be compared for three years to determine if this is so.
As a result of the involvement of the parents in the project, parental literacy may increase. Since research shows that student academic achievement levels are closely tied to that of the parents, we hypothesize that residual effects may show up in the siblings of those in the PCs for Families program.
Software has been matched to hardware capability, and the class will have almost dedicated T1 access to the Internet. Printers are easily accessible, supplies have been included, and all communications expenses will be taken care of by the project. All computers will be fully maintained through the project so that no families will be forced out of the program by hardware failures. Ms. Ramsey and Ms. Hood will have student-grade computer configurations at home for their own use.
At the end of the project, Virginia Tech will transfer titles of the student computers to those families who have met their program obligations, and other facilities will be transferred to Montgomery County Public Schools.
Hodas, Steven, Technology Refusal and the Organizational Culture of Schools, Educational Policy Analysis Archives 1, No. 10, September 14 1993, available through the listserver edployar@asuvm.inre.asu.edu.
Larkins, A., and Hawkins, M.L., Trivial and noninformative Content in Primary-Grade Social Studies Texts: A Second Look, Journal of Social Studies Research 14 (1), Winter 1990, pp. 25- 32.
Sewall, G.T., American History Textbooks: An Assessment of Quality, Educational Excellence Network, October 1987.
Strommen, Erik F. and Lincoln, Bruce, Constructivism, Technology, and the Future of Classroom Learning, Education and Urban Society 24, August 1992, pp. 466-476.