Copyright ©Tatar 2005
Ever since its inception, teachers, administrators, policy-makers, and parents have been sceptical about the merits of employing technology in learning. It has seemed expensive, difficult, and threatening to their confidence that children are learning. In the early days, there was a nearly endless series of articles about whether CAI (Computer-Aided Instruction) was useful. There was also a similar debate about whether Logo, the computer language for children which changed my life, and made my entire career possible, was useful or a waste of time. This debate initially seemed ridiculous to me. After all, when I came to Logo in the early 1980's, I was already a Harvard grad, who had won the math and science prizes in high school and who had completed my pre-med requirements in college with an excellent GPA. I was well read in cognitive science and the beliefs about brain behavior of the time. I had even (unusually for the time) written a computer program: in Basic using a Tyco editor, both of which I taught myself. In other words, I was the kind of person who should have known about programming thought easily. And Logo made it utterly obvious to me a) that I did not know anything, and b) what I had to do to grapple with this fascinating area. Logo had given me access to a world of ideas and a capacity for action that would have otherwise remained entirely outside my reach.
Over time, however, the debate came to seem less ridiculous to me. I saw how Logo had been oversold; how it had left good people disappointed; how it taxed the resources of well-intentioned schools, teachers and students, stranding them, as it were, up a creek without a paddle. And I came to share a parent's concern for the well-being of his/her children, surrounded by advice, filled with worry, poised to fly to their defense like a bird diverting a predator, and with little knowledge of appropriate developmental paths and trajectories. Furthermore, the outside world has changed in recent years. One has to ask, as a parent did at a professional ACM meeting recently, "Why should my school invest in computers for math when they can't even afford art?"
This is an excellent question, and one that requires a serious answer. Part of the answer is philosophical----math more than any other subject is used to separate students into tracks that determine their possible futures. Many people are sending their children to private schools so that they can have art and music, languages and learn how to write.
However, arguably, in private as well as public schools, it is a deficit in math that really prevents a student who comes from less fortunate circumstances from rising; it is a defiict in math that keeps them from the professions; it is the deficit in math that marks the student for a second class college education and poor job prospects.
The second part of my answer is empirical. The Scaling Up SimCalc project is an exploration of how to take the results of a design experiment and extend the evidence to speak to teachers, administrators, policy-makers, policitians, parents as well as the design experimentation community.
Scalling Up starts with SimCalc, an already well-established technology for teaching the math of change and variation (www.simcalc.umassd.edu) and asks the question "Can a wide variety of teachers work with this technology / curriculum to the benefit of their students?" We have been answering this question in the context of a controlled experiment in Texas, focusing on 7th grade pegaogy towards rate and proportionality.
Our pilot experiment, completed Spring 2005, was highly successful. We are currently training 150 teachers in Texas for a full scale experiment starting in the Fall 2005.
For more detailed information, see Scaling Up papers in my Publication page, or go to www.ScalingUp