Radically Improving How We Learn: Seizing the Opportunity

By Kay Howell

Americans understand well the importance of education and training to our country’s future, both in terms of personal and economic success, as well as national security.

We care deeply about education and training, so much so that we invest nearly a trillion dollars a year in it, nearly one sixth of the nation’s GDP. Parents, students, and businesses – whose economic success depends largely on a well-trained, highly-skilled workforce – consistently list the quality and effectiveness of the educational enterprise among their top concerns. There is a strong consensus that a dramatic improvement in learning outcomes is needed. While the U.S. educational enterprise is among the best in the world, the variances in results and access are far too great. The median results are too low and the bottom end of the performance curve is also much too low. ¹

Much Debate, Little Vision

There is considerable debate about how to fix this problem, but remarkably little vision. We constrain ourselves by failing to “think outside of the box,” specifically in this case, by failing to engage our imaginations to think beyond today’s model of a classroom with thirty students and a teacher lecturing at the front of the classroom. Thanks to recent advances in learning science and information technology, we have the opportunity to completely re-think how we teach and learn. We have the chance to provide education with the richest tool set in history; tools that in the hands of well-educated teachers and trainers have the potential to make learning more meaningful, more engaging, more effective, and more accessible. However, this potential cannot be harnessed without significant, sustained basic and applied research in learning science and technology. Current R&D funding levels are grossly inadequate and existing R&D efforts are fragmented and often discontinuous. We lack an established community of researchers, industrial participants, educators, and educational institutions from which we can mobilize teams that span technology and learning to develop, evaluate, and distribute innovative learning tools.

FAS is working aggressively to increase awareness of the potential for new learning environments and to promote and stimulate R&D investments. Our Learning Technologies program is focused on strengthening the community of scholars interested in education technologies R&D. The program’s activities include collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information on worldwide R&D in learning technology. FAS serves as the Executive Secretary for the Learning Federation, which is being formed as a private/public research consortium for learning science and technology to fill the enormous void in national research. The Learning Federation will focus on R&D to facilitate the creation of new learning environments for post-secondary education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, although the research results and tools developed will have wider implications and be useful for all age groups and all subject areas. FAS will provide administrative leadership, increase the Learning Federation membership, and develop a technical research roadmap and management plan for the Learning Federation research fund. We are also meeting with and briefing public policy makers on the importance of learning science and information technology R&D in order to solicit their support for this important area of research.

Re-Thinking How We Teach and Learn

Almost every enterprise in America has been transformed by the use of technology over the past twenty years. Why is it that we still teach and learn in much the same way as we did at the turn of the century? Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate in Physics, observed that “A visitor from 1900 would feel totally out of place in our greatly changed world, except in one environment.  In our classrooms we are still teaching in ways designed in the nineteenth century.” If you ask the question, “Why do we teach the way we do?” the answer would probably be that we didn’t know there were other options. This no longer needs to be true. With what we now know about cognition, and with advances in information technology, we need not be constrained to a model of a 30-student classroom with a teacher lecturing. Learning science research tells us that tutoring produces significant improvements in knowledge and skills. Throughout history, work requiring highly specialized skills has been taught in one-on-one learning situations. Two hundred years ago apprenticeships were used. Today, surgeons, pilots, even student drivers are taught using one-on-one tutoring methods. We justify the time and cost of one-on-one tutoring for these “learners” because the tasks they are to perform require great skill, and because lives could be lost if the individual doesn’t successfully master the needed skills. However, the high cost of one-on-one tutoring makes it unaffordable for most learning situations. Our goal should be to use new methods and technologies to achieve similar results to those of one-on-one tutoring at a reasonable cost. Information technology, used both within classroom settings with well-educated and motivated teachers and individuals, has the potential to do this.

A Vision for The Future

Current use of computers in learning provides us with a limited glimpse of the potential of technology-enabled education, but current uses fail to exploit the potential of emerging technologies. The best is yet to come.

One of the most significant opportunities provided by emerging information technologies is that these technologies may make it practical to adopt approaches to learning that theorists have advocated for many years — shifting from learning to know, to learning to do. With “just-in-case” education, students learn a comprehensive curriculum without an emphasis on how or when this information is to be used. With “just-in-time” learning, students focus on a topic when the knowledge is directly related to a problem they’ve encountered. Inquiry-based (also known as project-based) learning centers instruction on “authentic tasks” that allow students to model adult professional skills and behaviors.

Powerful computer simulations can allow participants to navigate through the interior of a cell, gain experience operating or repairing complex or expensive equipment, practice surgical procedures, or practice marketing techniques. Highly visual, interactive systems allow learners to grasp complex concepts quickly and retain this understanding in ways that transfer rapidly to practical problems. New communication tools can enable learners to collaborate in complex projects and ask for help from instructors and experts from around the world. The systems can be built to adapt to differences in student interests and backgrounds, learning styles and aptitudes. Technology-enabled educational systems can provide a much richer set of tests and measures of a student’s grasp of information and ability to use this knowledge to solve practical problems. Systems can continuously measure a student’s grasp of concepts being learned, the learning style which the student finds most comfortable, and student motivation and interest. Using this information, the system can then adapt instruction and build a sophisticated record of expertise.

Achieving the Vision

Given the importance of education and training, and our seemingly universal agreement that significant improvements are needed, it is difficult to understand why we invest so little in research and development aimed at improving how we teach and learn. R&D in K-12 education is funded at only 0.03 percent of total K-12 expenditures ($100 million out of $300 billion expended).² We invest approximately $10-20 billion annually on computers, internet connections, and other information technology hardware for education, but less than $100 million to study how to unleash the potential of this hardware or to examine whether it has any beneficial affect. The success of information and training technology can only be established with development, use, and evaluation.

One of the greatest R&D challenges is the development of the software tools and systems which would enable the routine use of highly-interactive learning environments and facilitate development of education and training content. Currently, it is not unusual to spend 100-200 hours developing one hour’s worth of interactive materials, and simulations are even more difficult and costly. We need a wide range of tools that perform well and predictably; that can be easily adapted to learning contexts and learners’ needs; and that are interoperable, extensible, scalable, and maintainable over time. Developing these software tools and systems will be like other software development efforts: it is difficult, labor intensive, expensive, and subject to errors.

To support the development of these software tools and systems, new research management mechanisms that support systematic engineering approaches are needed. The education technology community is still working in a cottage industry mode. Typically a single person or a very small group attempts to build most tools from scratch – including simulation tools, systems for tracking students, systems for answering questions, etc. These efforts are disconnected, sporadic, custom-built, and largely unevaluated. This is how software design began in all areas, but most other sectors of the U.S. economy have moved to more advanced models of software development.

Seizing the Opportunity

Enabling the types of new learning environments we envision will require significant effort. It will require building a community of researchers that spans technology, cognition and learning, and education. A wide range of well-performing, maintainable, and extensible software tools and systems need to be developed, evaluated, and disseminated. To make progress, we need to agree on the critical research challenges, articulate a research plan that outlines an R&D chronology and establishes metrics for success, to grow and mobilize teams to perform the R&D, and establish effective methods for evaluation of successes and failures. Increased funding for learning science and technology R&D is needed, as well as new management mechanisms to support large-scale, sustained efforts to complement the small grant proposals currently supported. The breadth and scale of the needed research effort and the necessity for learning technology, innovation, and diffusion requires unprecedented cooperation and partnerships among government, industry, foundations, universities, and schools.

There is a great deal of work to do. But the opportunity to make learning more productive and more engaging for all people is simply too important for us to ignore. It is difficult to imagine any innovation that would have a greater impact on prosperity, or offer a more practical chance to ensure that the benefits of a technologically sophisticated society are broadly shared.

Notes:

1. Report to President Bush, “Using Information Technology to Transform the Way We Learn”, President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, February 2001.
2. Report to President Bush, “Using Information Technology to Transform the Way We Learn”, President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, February 2001.