By Ted Hasselbring, Ed.D.
Microcomputer technology was just evolving in the early 1980s when my colleague, Laura Goin, and I started to experiment with computer-based teaching environments at Vanderbilt University. This was 20 years before Facebook, fifteen years before Google, and no one carried cell phones – especially not students. This was a time when there were almost no computers in schools, and we were creating long forgotten “videodiscs” and using “HyperCard” to access the desired video clip as we engaged struggling readers and helped them build the necessary background knowledge needed to comprehend what they were reading.
But despite how ancient it sounds, what we were doing was working. High school students who struggled to read were showing vast improvement using this technology-supported pedagogy. The technological tools we developed were helping us with tasks that we humans struggle with: providing instant and corrective feedback, mastery learning, repetitive practice and data collection, those things that lead to expertise in learners.
The technology we experimented with back then became the foundation of a reading intervention program used now by more than 1 million students across the country every day — READ 180. And at a time when companies and developers are struggling to make their technology tools stick in schools and prove that they work, READ 180 is one of the educational technology field’s greatest success stories. I believe it can teach us a lot about why and how technology can work in schools, including how to take programs to scale and how to balance the technology with the science of learning.
Through years of experimentation, we learned that applying the right technology in the right ways could help teachers do their jobs better and students learn better. From the beginning, the work we did was about finding new ways to support the needs of students who struggled and needed to catch up, and the teachers who teach them. We started with what we knew about students’ deficiencies, and looked at ways that technology could help teachers do a better job at meeting those challenges.
The technological advances the world has made since then are staggering. In the age of the iPad, we are easily mesmerized by new apps, devices and social networks that give us new ways of creating and sharing content, communicating and collaborating with our peers, and documenting the world around us. Indeed, these tools have influenced revolts and revolutions in recent years in Tunisia, Egypt and Iran, and changed the way politicians raise money and companies do business. Some say the secret to transforming our schools into true learning laboratories for the 21st Century is to bring these shiny tools into the classroom.
Understanding and leveraging ways technology can help students and teachers is critical, but it can’t come at the expense of the science of learning. Over the years, to take advantage of advances in technology we have modified and improved READ 180 yet we have remained loyal to the foundations we set in the 1980s – focusing on helping struggling readers, using years of research and science to figure out how technology can fill in the gaps and help do things that humans don’t do well. And even as we leverage the new technologies available, even as we, too, feel the sway of the tempting new gadgets that hit the market each month, we’re still focusing on the end goal: teaching kids to read, using the science of learning as our root.
If we want to help our schools to become more effective, more exciting and more relevant, we shouldn’t rush to implement technology for technology’s sake. We should exploit it for learning’s sake. #
Dr. Ted S. Hasselbring is a research professor in the department of special education at Vanderbilt University. He has conducted research on the use of technology for enhancing learning in students with mild disabilities and those at-risk of school failure.
Leave a comment