Technology Integration Article Review Project

Technology Integration Article Review Project

In APA Style

Annie Kroll

Teaching and Learning 466

For this project, I read through Nicholas J. Turro’s article “Constructivism and Information Technology at Columbia: A Journey from the Wilderness to the Promised Land”. In it, the author goes through how he and other faculty members at Columbia were able to use technology to help their students succeed in their classes. Here at WSU, I hear that many of the teachers are more concerned with their research than with actually teaching their students. While research is an important and necessary part of growth and change, I found it refreshing to read an article about a teacher than went the extra mile to help his students comprehend the material from his classes, and wondered what he did that I could apply to my teaching methods when I actually start teaching. His class was an undergraduate chemistry class, and mine will be a high school (or possibly middle school/junior high) class, but due to the success that he had, I think there are a lot of ideas that I can take away from this and use myself. Five topics that the author presents in this article that I found to be especially interesting and relevant were how students learn from each other versus how students learn from teachers lecturing; how technology was used to promote learning by his students; why constructivism was such an integral part of the success of this experiment; whether or not students were capable of constructing the learning tools themselves; and, the effectiveness of a mentor-apprentice approach in projects.

Turro starts off the article by recounting how he was worried about the number of students in his class that were headed toward a failing grade, and the steps he took to see what more could be done for them. In an experiment that he loosely conducted, he held a study session to which approximately 20 of the 40 students having serious trouble in his class attended. In this study session, the teachers contributed little more than the occasional answer to a group question. Most of the teaching was done by the students themselves as they went over problems as a group. The students’ grades dramatically improved by the end of the term, indicating that the students learning much better when they had someone else in a similar position (as a student) to explain the concepts to them (Turro, 2005: p. 1292). This story is very advocative of group problem solving as a way to teach the more difficult concepts, or concepts that students, for the most part, simply are missing the point of. The students doing the explaining get to review the material and know it extra-well since they’re repeating it to their classmates, and the students listening to them get the information explained to them in a way that is more easily comprehensible to them. For Spanish, this would be a great way to arrange the class when teaching something as complex as the subjunctive, the difference between situations requiring the preterit tense and those requiring the imperfect tense, and even something like discussion of the differences between the two ‘to be’ verbs, ser and estar. The teacher can’t be at each group at one time to assess student learning, but the idea is that other students will be helping each other along in constructing knowledge based on previous learning, just as a teacher would do. Unfortunately, I think that this would be a method that I as a teacher couldn’t use as frequently as I would like to; the students would get too comfortable, and would be more prone to get off task or not talk in Spanish.

In the course of explaining this journey from lecture to reliance on IT, Turro explains their first real IT tool: the Infrared Tutor, which helped students to learn about infrared spectroscopy. According to Turro, “The main feature that provides an active engagement is the ability to connect the IR signal with thevibrational motion of a set of atoms by simply clicking on the IR signal which causes an animation of the vibration to appear…By running through the set of functional groups and comparing the overlap of their IR spectrum with that of a saturated hydrocarbon, the program allows the student to create new and robust knowledge of how to interpret infrared spectra” (Turro, 2005: p. 1293). While I don’t understand all of what he said in that quote, I can imagine that it must be a lot easier to comprehend when there’s a visual, interactive model to demonstrate concepts such as this. By using technology in this way, the instructor is able to reach different types of learners. The auditory learners are engaged by listening to what their instructor/classmates say, the visual learners learn from the material presented on a computer, and the kinesthetic learners learn by being able to participate and actually click on different of things in the program to make things happen. In a Spanish class, it might be difficult to do this often, since most classes don’t have that many computers in it, and there are only so many days that you can make use of the computer lab for your own class. This minor detail aside, instruction in this method would, I believe, be a little bit easier on the teacher because it frees them up to circulate around the room, paying more attention to each individual student, and answering questions with greater ease. Teaching with interactive programs such as the IR spectroscopy one that Turro and his companions created might be a good idea some of the time, but I think that for a Spanish classroom, interaction with other students is more important. There are always students that understand some concepts better than others, and I think it would be killing two birds with one stone if I as a teacher relied more on that than on a computer to explain something. In addition to this, most of the more complex things in Spanish that need detailed explanations probably wouldn’t need interactive programs such as this. I think that the group work was a much better idea when dealing with a Spanish class.

This particular article did not give an actual definition of constructivism, so I looked elsewhere for it. The one I found (Huitt, 2003) is as follows:

The basic premise is that an individual learner must actively "build" knowledge and skills (e.g., Bruner, 1990) and that information exists within these built constructs rather than in the external environment. [See Ullman (1980) versus Gibson (1979) for an overview of this controversy within the cognitive perspective.] However, all advocates of constructivism agree that it is the individual's processing of stimuli from the environment and the resulting cognitive structures, that produce adaptive behavior, rather than the stimuli themselves.

Turro gives much of the credit of their success to their constructivist approach, saying that his experiments “validate the principles of constructivism” (Turro, 2005: p. 1293), and the rest of his article is more or less devoted to showing how student interaction helped them build on previous knowledge, and what they were able to create with a constructivist approach and access to technology and funds to pay for it. This is, I think, an excellent way to approach teaching Spanish. The instructor was motivated to change his methods from traditional lecturing to actually involving the students, and providing the stimuli necessary to make them construct their own learning and knowledge on top of that which they already had. For a Spanish teacher in a high school class, student-created technology projects would be a time consuming, but ultimately very rewarding endeavor. The students would not only learn from working on their own projects; they would learn from the projects that others create as well. The teacher, meanwhile, would learn more and more about how to assign such a project, the parameters they should specify the next time they attempt something similar, and information that they probably didn’t know with regards to the subject.

Turro explains that he hypothesized that “Students, if provided with faculty mentors and support in learning how to use the powerful new software, could construct comparable modules on content of interest to chemical education” (Turro, 2005: p. 1294). I think it’s really important to leave a lot of the responsibility to the student. Obviously they’ll need some help with the technology, but students have the maturity, even as teenagers, to be in charge of their own learning if they’re given the chance and provided with the structure. In a Spanish class, this wouldn’t be different than Turro’s class.

Turro later on said that the results of the experiments in producing these modules showed that, “constructivist principles of collaborative and interactive learning can be effectively applied by having the undergraduates trained as a group under the mentorship of a postdoctoral associate” (Turro, 2005: p. 1294). While I don’t think it would be very plausible to get a bunch of postdoctoral folks to come in and teach students, I do think that this idea could be applicable, with a little tweaking, to a Spanish classroom. Students from different levels of Spanish that have already learned a concept and how to use the information technology would be able to give a tutorial lesson to students at a lower level. This would make students in charge of other students’ learning, and would help them to reinforce their own knowledge of the concepts and the technology being used. I doubt that it would be that difficult to do a collaborative lesson with some other class in this way, and it would be fun for the students to interact with students from other classes and grade levels.

References

Huitt, W. (2003). Constructivism. Retrieved October 18, 2007, from Educational

Psychology Interactive Web site: http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/cogsys/construct.html

Turro, N. J. (2005).Constructivism and Information Technology at Columbia: A Journey

from the Wilderness to the Promised Land. Journal of Chemical Education. 82. 9., 1292-1299.