Punya Mishra, Matthew Koehler, and Kristen Kereluik (2009) agreed that, due to the belief that technology would rescue education, “most innovations have focused inordinately on the technology rather than more fundamental issues of how to approach teaching subject matter with these technologies” (p. 49). Mishra and his colleagues (2009) summarized the value-neutral perspective well: “If technology is truly to be beneficial to education, the power and potential of educational technology must be acknowledged to reside within educators and not within objects” (p. 52).
Our Perspective in This Book
For the most part, our perspective in this book is that educational technology has a slight tendency toward being value positive. We believe that when considered as a whole, the aforementioned categories of educational technology use—computers, the Internet, interactive whiteboards, and mobile devices—will produce a slight positive effect on student learning. However, when combined with effective use of specific instructional strategies, the positive effects on student learning are greater than the effect of the technology used in isolation or the instructional strategies used in isolation. To use a well-worn phrase, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Both authors of this book have had concrete experience to this end.
As mentioned previously, Marzano Research (since renamed Marzano Resources) conducted a series of studies on the effects of IWBs on student achievement (Marzano & Haystead, 2009, 2010). These studies involved over 130 teachers who used IWB technology with one group of students and IWB-free methods with a second group of students. In both classes, teachers took the same amount of time to teach the same content and used the same assessments to measure student growth and learning. However, in one class, they used IWB technology and in the other they didn’t. The overall effect size for the use of IWBs was 0.37, which translates into a 14 percentile point gain. This finding would seem to support the notion that the use of a specific type of educational technology, in this case the use of interactive whiteboards, has a moderate positive effect on student learning. However, when video recordings of the teachers were analyzed to see how well they used specific instructional strategies—such as chunking content, scaffolding information, and monitoring student progress—the researchers found a strong relationship between the execution of the strategies and the effect of IWB usage on student achievement. Specifically, when teachers used IWB technology and executed strategies well, the effect size was 1.60, indicating a 45 percentile point gain. The average effect of these strategies without IWB technology has been shown to be about 0.64, indicating a 24 percentile point gain. Essentially, the combined effect of IWB technology and the effective execution of instructional strategies was greater than the independent effect of either variable in isolation.
One School’s Experience
Action research was conducted in an elementary school in California to examine the use of technology to support or enhance specific instructional strategies (Haystead & Magaña, 2013). This low-performing elementary school served a very diverse, high-needs population of students. Most of the students attending this school lived at or below the poverty level and qualified for the free or reduced lunch program. Nearly half of the students in the school were English learners, and many were considered highly mobile, meaning they had changed their place of residence at least twice during an academic year. Prior to the introduction of technology professional development and tools in 2009, the school had failed to attain adequate yearly progress, as measured by the California Academic Performance Index (API), for five consecutive years. Student behavior and attendance issues were also major concerns in this school.
Beginning in the 2009–2010 academic year, the school received focused professional development about using their existing technology tools to support specific instructional strategies. The teachers and the school instructional coach were trained to use IWBs, IWB software, and student response systems in combination with effective instructional strategies (such as previewing, chunking, scaffolding, pacing, monitoring student progress, identifying similarities and differences, using nonlinguistic representations, and using questioning strategies).
As described previously, the school had failed to meet API standards for five years before the beginning of the study. In 2010, however, the school received a Growth API score of 804, achieving adequate yearly progress for the first time. This was followed by two more years of growth. Furthermore, the school outperformed the median Growth API score, which includes one hundred other California schools with similar demographic characteristics (for example, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, English learner population, and so on). Figure 1.3 compares this school’s API scores with the median Growth API scores from 2004 to 2012.
Figure 1.3: Comparison of median academic growth and growth of the test school as measured by the California API.
Source: Haystead & Magaña, 2013, p. 8.
The percentage of students in the school achieving proficient or advanced levels of achievement in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics on the California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) Program increased during the first year of the study, as well as in each consecutive year (see figure 1.4). Additionally, the school’s principal reported a decrease in student behavioral issues and increases in student attendance and teacher morale.
Figure 1.4: Percentage of students scoring at the proficient or advanced level in ELA and math on STAR.
Source: Haystead & Magaña, 2013, p. 11.
Other factors may have contributed to the school’s gains in achievement (for example, effective school leadership, district management, and instructional coaching in the building). Still, a reasonable inference can be made that the guidance provided to teachers on using existing technology tools to enhance instruction was a contributing factor to academic growth.
Our Instructional Model
Throughout this book, we discuss a variety of types of educational technology. However, we do so in concert with specific instructional strategies. That is, we do not discuss technology in isolation, nor do we discuss instruction in isolation. Rather, we discuss how specific technology tools can be used with specific instructional strategies.
We use the instructional framework articulated in The Art and Science of Teaching (Marzano, 2007) and further detailed in several additional books, including A Handbook for the Art and Science of Teaching (Marzano & Brown, 2009), Effective Supervision (Marzano et al., 2011), and Becoming a Reflective Teacher (Marzano, 2012). This framework presents three lesson segments, which signify the main types of procedures used in the classroom (routine events, content, and on the spot). Each lesson segment is further categorized into design questions, which organize the forty-one elements (or forty-one categories of specific classroom strategies and behaviors) that correlate with teacher proficiency in the classroom. Table 1.5 lists the forty-one elements of the framework presented in The Art and Science of Teaching.
Table 1.5: Forty-One Elements of The Art and Science of Teaching Framework
| Lesson Segments Involving Routine Events |
| Design Question: What will I do to establish and communicate learning goals, track student progress, and celebrate success? Element 1: Providing clear learning goals and scales (rubrics) Element 2: Tracking student progress Element 3: Celebrating success |
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Design Question:
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