"Not a Multiple Choice World"
It's become a cliché: The third-grader who can download songs faster than her teacher can. The middle-schooler text-messaging to his friends during class.. Or, on a more serious note, the high-school clique that uses cyber-bullying to pick on a peer.
Today's students haven't known any world other than that of cell phones, MP3 and YouTube. The Associated Press notes: "About 84 percent of all K-12 students nationwide use computers in their schools daily, and that number goes up to more than 91 percent for students 15 and older, according to the U.S. Department of Education ." But for all their quickness to adopt new technology and their comfort on the latest gadgets, are these students truly tech-savvy in the educational sense? That is, do they know how to use the computer to find reliable information? Or, even, as Star-Ledger writer Kelly Heyboer puts it, "Can they compose a decent e-mail?"
Last November, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) tested more than 6,000 college students and found that only 52 percent of test takers could correctly judge the objectivity of a Web site, and only 65% could correctly judge the site’s authoritativeness. In a Web search task, only 40 percent entered multiple search terms to narrow the results. And when selecting a research statement for a class assignment, only 44 percent identified a statement that captured the demands of the assignment.
The tech-savvy student question works on two levels. On one level, "many students say they use technology at “a fairly sophisticated level,” especially when compared with their teachers," according to a study published by Education Evolving, a joint venture of the Center for Policy Studies and Hamline University.
But the same report notes that one study conducted by NetDay "shows that students use technology well to accomplish assigned work, but their application knowledge and ability to solve problems using technology is generally not sophisticated." Eighty-seven percent of students participating in NetDay’s 2003 focus groups ranked themselves as intermediate to expert-level users of the Internet. One-third ranked their teachers as beginners.
At another level, these Web-surfing, blogging, downloading, text-messaging kids are not getting enough educational value out of their technology. " Every semester, countless students will engage in research to complete assignments," notes Mardi Mahaffey in an article published in College Teaching. "In recent years, as students' reliance on Internet research has grown, professors have expressed a growing dissatisfaction with the research efforts and thinking skills demonstrated by students . The majority of traditional students entering college today consider themselves savvy Internet users …and are accustomed to the convenience of Web availability from multiple locations and the specificity of full text searching that allows them to, within seconds, hone in on paragraphs that contain their search terms while avoiding the larger context."
In other words, teachers are seeing research that is "cursory at best," as Mahaffey put it, while educators are "increasingly struggling to encourage students to perform library research that involves a more in-depth and critical exploration of the subject matter than a quick Google search typically provides."
And the call for critical thinking goes beyond the school. "Employers across the country are screaming that college graduates do not write well," said Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, told Melissa Ludwig of the San Antonia Express-News. "There is a reason. They have not practiced writing."
The solution, Schneider told the newspaper, emphasizes a liberal education, "one that fosters a broad worldview and teaches critical thinking skills that cut across disciplines," as Ludwig wrote. "Employers feel strongly that this is not a multiple-choice world," Schneider said.
Tuned-In Teacher
There is an educator out in cyberspace who is determined to help students and teachers integrate technology in the cause of productive learning. "I am not a techie," says David Warlick, "but I love to program computers. It is the same joy that I had playing with LEGOs when I was 13."
Warlick has been a teacher, district administrator and staff consultant for 30 years, as well as an innovator in the field of educational technology. He says his Web site, Landmarks for Schools (http://landmark-project.com), "is a labor of love for teachers offering links to hundreds of Web sites." Warlick's books include Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century, a model for literacy skills in a world of networked digital information,
Thomson Gale is sponsoring an appearance by David Warlick at this year's Texas Library Association national conference, April 11-14 in San Antonio. For more information, contact terri.alcazar@thomson.com.