Month: May 2025

The Concept of Disruption Applied to Education

The Concept of Disruption Applied to Education

I think of Clayton Christensen as a theorist and writer mainly focused on business. He seems to focus on the challenges of change. Two core ideas have stuck with me. First is the concept of the innovator’s dilemma, which describes the difficulty of moving on from a successful approach when faced with new circumstances. Why does success at one point limit future success. The second core topic considers the opportunities and risks that arise when a field encounters great disruption. These two big ideas are interrelated, as great disruptions may create circumstances challenging an existing successful approach.

Big ideas are not necessarily specific to a given field (e.g., business) and Christensen has made the effort to apply his theories to education. This effort resulted in his 2008 book Disrupting Class, written with Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson. For those interested in K12 education, it should not be difficult to anticipate how Christensen’s core ideas might apply. The methods of K12 teaching are often criticized as unchanging often noting that someone from a century ago would not be lost if suddenly dropped into a classroom of today. The long-standing model involves age-based classes of students reporting to a teacher standing at the front of a room, engaging the class with presentations and discussions covering isolated subjects of math, science, history, and language arts with performance evaluated using tests at regular intervals. This model has existed in pretty much the same approach for a long period of time and seems very resistant to change.

While stable, the K12 model faces significant challenges. Students are often unmotivated with high absentee rates. Despite significant resources invested in the U.S., performance measured by standardized tests lags behind that observed in other countries. The COVID crisis appears to have created problems that remain when students could not meet in the traditional face-to-face classroom situation. Despite the mantras of “all students succeed” and “leave no child behind”, student performance has grown increasingly more variable as students move through the grade levels, bringing many questions of meeting the needs of a diverse population of learners into focus.

These issues exist within an environment of educator complaints of low pay and a lack of public support, with increasing pressure to address an ever-increasing number of goals. Why aren’t students more capable of understanding the basics of money management? Why are kids spending so much time on their phones and reading so little? Why are kids questioning their sexual orientation? Why can’t K12 schools do a better job of preparing those students who are interested in a job after high school rather than pursuing the experiences of higher education? Why do kids have so many psychological problems?

Rereading Disrupting Class

After the delay of a decade or so, I just reread Christensen’s Disrupting Class, which turned out to be an interesting experience in a couple of ways. First, I don’t reread many books because there always seems to be something new I want to read, but the investment of time may be beneficial with a certain type of book. Rereading books that gave you important insights into an emerging or changing situation can be quite informative. The delay between reads allows the accumulation of relevant experiences that allow further reflection on your original conclusions and insights. These intervening experiences can also guide rereading to discover nuances that did not initially stand out. There is more. Some writers who explore an emerging trend are willing to predict specific accomplishments and related time frames. What actually happened? Were the predictions realized, and if not, what factors turned out to prevent the predicted outcomes?

I became interested in Christensen’s analysis of the challenges of K12 education because I thought the challenges I have already outlined could be addressed through the use of technology to individualize learning opportunities in ways that addressed differences in aptitude, existing knowledge, and preferences for different approaches to learning (Christensen used Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences as a justification for alternate learning experiences.). When translating these suggestions to my own way of thinking about instructional alternatives, I equated Christensen’s suggestions with an updated way of implementing mastery learning, taking advantage of online technology. This was not the term used in his book, but Christensen did mention k12.org as one of his examples and I would define this as an example of online mastery instruction.

Christensen observed that disruptive practices tend to emerge in the margins with mainstream practices being very resistant to disruption. Established mainstream practices fall prey to the innovator’s dilemma, with efforts limited to doing a better job of what is already being done. He predicted that home schooling, credit recovery experiences (a way to address failed or incomplete courses), and unique courses that cannot draw enough students in an individual school would provide the earliest exposure for online, individualized learning experiences.

While online, digital approaches have succeeded on the fringe, these successes are intended to encourage more mainstream adoption. Now this is what I mean by having the opportunity to test predictions. Implementation has not progressed as anticipated. For example, Christensen predicted that by 2019, about 50% of high school courses would be delivered online. This prediction proved to be overly optimistic, and I would guess that any movement in that direction was reversed by negative experiences associated with the total forced online efforts of the COVID years. There are other failed predictions. One concerns the alternative educational materials that would be available to satisfy the multiple intelligences Christensen identified. Rather than a single, common textbook, he predicted that technology would mature to the point that educators and student peers could create learning materials. Course management systems (CMSs) were emerging and these systems would serve to store, sequence, and provide options generated by commercial providers as well as educators themselves. Perhaps some attempts have been made in this direction. I would point to concepts such as Google app-based Hyperdocs and teacher-based content production processes such as Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) as consistent with this prediction, but the scale of adoption has been small.

I spent some of my time teaching in a graduate program focused on Instructional Design and I did find the concept of teachers as instructional designers of interest. To this point, educators are not prepared as designers and instructional design is different from lesson planning. Teachers would certainly have the background to become instructional designers, but like so many things educators could do, there is always the issue of how their time should be allocated.

Is technology a tool for disruption or will it be limited to isolated and focused improvements?

Perhaps technology is not a tool that will result in educational disruption, but will play a more focused role in improving some specific areas of what we already do. The alternative could be that technology provides the only reasonable means to break free from an approach that seems to be floundering in complexity, inefficiency, and frustration. Perhaps Christensen succumbed to Amara’s law. You may have heard of this but not know to whom the argument has been attributed. When associated with progress involving technology, Amara proposed that we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term and underestimate the impact in the long term. Perhaps we are too impatient.

I understand that one criticism of those who advocate alternatives to the status quo is that when an alternative does not seem to generate much change, the reaction is to claim “you didn’t do it right”. There is certainly some legitimacy in the claim that people are reluctant to abandon good ideas when the ideas do not result in practical successes. Keeping this in mind in combination with the limited success of current approaches, I still believe there are some areas of potential.

Here are some examples:

Teachers can create instructional materials efficiently with the use of AI. Specialized AI tools (e.g., eduaide.ai, Diffit) assist educators in creating instructional materials customized to suit students who prefer different types of learning experiences.

AI offers the opportunity for personalized tutoring. Christensen refers frequently to the impact of tutoring, but he uses tutoring to refer to instructional tutorials. It is true that there are certain ways in which tutorials provide individualized learning experiences. When I think of tutoring, and this has been a topic I have always found interesting, I tend to think of a one-to-one interaction with another individual. Again, AI can approximate this experience and is more accessible and economical than traditional tutors. I have written several posts focused on AI tutors and I encourage educators to explore this possibility. The common complaint that technology is isolating is worth considering. As an adult independent learner, I would counter that all of us end up learning in isolation. Having suggested developing the skills of independent learning to be essential, I do note Christensen lists two requirements that must be met to motivate K12 learners?—?a way to feel competent as a learner and social connections. I agree and see peer engagement within an AI tutoring environment as a very reasonable approach. This strategy offers a combination of AI and peer tutoring.

Individualized learning opportunities?—?I am not ready to give up on online, individualized learning experiences. These experiences might best be used as a supplement to other classroom experiences (i.e., as an alternative to a textbook) or assigned for enhancement or remedial purposes. Khan Academy offers a flexible environment and set of tools that should be available for assignment by educators or access by individual learners.

I am not ready to dismiss the role technology can play in K12 education. I am waiting for those who point to limitations to offer reasonable options.

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Highlighting in the age of digital content

I have highlighted much of what I read for probably 50 years. I started in college, and I tried different approaches, sometimes highlighting with different colors. My preference was the slim highlighter in yellow. When I began reading using my phone, iPad, and Kindle, I learned how to highlight using these devices. My interest in educational technology led me to look more deeply into the opportunities to highlight and annotate on these devices, and you may have read what I have had to say about these tools in previous posts.

Here is the thing about highlighting. If you follow the research on the efficacy of different learning/study strategies, you soon understand that highlighting is not particularly useful. I knew this too, and I was interested in study techniques long before personal computers were a thing. I taught educational psychology to college students, and studying was a topic I hoped the students would find relevant. 

There are good reviews of the research on highlighting (Dunlosky, et al, 2013) that reach the conclusion that highlighting has low utility. I think it is important to carefully understand the methodology used in the studies that investigate highlighting. What is the breadth of the perspective? In research that examines the application of note-taking, a distinction is drawn between the generative and external functions of notes. I think a similar issue applies here. The research indicates highlighting is not cognitively active and has limited generative value, but what about external storage? If it was an hour before a major test and I was trying to review the 120 pages that were assigned in my textbook, I would rather I had highlighted that book than not.

Here are some of the major findings that challenge the value of highlighting.

Highlighting may improve recall but not comprehension. (see Ponce and colleagues resource as the source for most of the comments focused on recent studies of highlighting)

Learner-generated highlighting can improve memory for the highlighted material. However, this memory boost often doesn’t extend to improved comprehension. If this distinction makes little sense, think of the difference in terms of the types of questions that might be asked to evaluate memory versus understanding. College students seem to gain more memory benefit from self-highlighting than K-12 students, potentially because they are more experienced at identifying key information. Studies focused on the importance of content that is highlighted demonstrate that college students are better at identifying core or main ideas. This makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, highlighting tends not to be encouraged among K-12 students as they use books that are not theirs. Second, college students are more experienced with the educational process and have a better feel for what content is likely to be the focus of future examinations or projects they will complete. As a consequence, and anticipating that advanced learners are likely to make use of highlighting, instruction focused on the identification of priority information is often recommended. Younger students should be asked to highlight and the type of content they designate should be evaluated.

Illusion of Mastery: Like passive rereading, looking at highlighted text can create a false sense of familiarity, leading learners to believe they know the material better than they do. This confuses familiarity with actual retrievability and understanding (Johns).

When I explored highlighting as a study technique with my students, I described a similar phenomenon. I call it the “I’ll get to that later” effect. What I proposed is that students seem to actually identify important content (these are college students), but may be challenged to understand this material. An easy way to move on and complete the reading assignment was to highlight this material, but not stop to struggle with the ideas. Later may not actually happen, or if it does, the highlighted material is then encountered out of context and less easily processed to a deeper level.

Ahrens (citations appear at the end of this post) proposes that underlining (I would assume a practice similar to highlighting) is similar to what Ahrens classifies as fleeting notes. Fleeting notes are taken to quickly capture information, and the idea of smart notes that Ahrens emphasizes focuses on the translation of fleeting notes into smart notes. A smart note can stand alone to convey meaning to the note taker and others and requires the note taker to use personal knowledge to generate a note that is meaningful now and hopefully in the future.

Highlighting of digital material may be different.

Digital reading can be different. Highlights can be exported and saved isolated from the original document. The accumulation of this once-deemed potentially useful text can be searched and examined, or potentially can become the target of an AI chat years later. This is very different than the way we highlighted journal articles or books a decade or so ago. The journals and books were stored in long rows on our office shelves, with the highlighted prose unlikely to be discovered when useful. Some books while read, were returned to the library and not highlighted in the first place. 

An Edutopia article on highlighting reached a negative conclusion about the value of highlighting (it may even hinder learning) and suggested solutions that educators should explain in a way very similar to that of the difference between fleeting and permanent notes. Those who are into Personal Knowledge Management methods for taking and retaining useful notes probably recognize this distinction. Ahrens suggested these terms as a way to identify important content (fleeting notes) with the expectation that this original material will receive further processing. He suggests that students a) annotate their highlights with short summaries and personal reflections or b) generate questions related to the content they have highlighted.

The Edutopia suggestions bring me to the perspective I want to emphasize.

Technology-based reading offers advantages over paper-based reading that are seldom emphasized. I rely heavily on highlighting when I write on my Kindle or using a browser extension that allows me to highlight web content. I don’t read from paper much anymore, but when I do, I also highlight a lot. When I use my iPad or computer to read and highlight, I tend to be using tools that allow me to add annotations (actually extended additions I would prefer to describe as notes) as part of the same integrated approach. I suppose I could read from a paper source and have a notebook on my desk at the same time, but I have never actually worked in this way. These highlights and notes are part of the original documents, but can also be exported for storage and further processing.

When I used to take notes from a highlighted book or journal article, it was usually later in some process of reviewing material in preparation to write something myself. In thinking about how I work now, I propose that reading using a technology-supported environment encourages the process of creating meaningful notes earlier in the process of writing, and is often disconnected from the process of creating the end product. There is an efficiency when meaningful notes are made during the initial process of reading new content in comparison to trying to create the same context when trying to make sense of highlights or notes that simply move unprocessed words from one paper source to another after a delay.

Here is my major use of the highlights from what I have read. As an academic researcher I read many, many journal articles. For the last 15 years of my career and since, I did my academic reading on the pdfs of these articles. Like other academics, I had access to these pdfs from pretty much any journal I wanted and I used these pdfs even when I owned the journals and they were on the shelf across the office from my desk. The tools I used to keep a record of the PDFs I read (originally to access the citations for articles) and to highlight these documents changed over the years, but I generated a large collection (hundreds) of highlighted articles. In recent years, I have been able to export the highlights and annotations and store this material using a personal knowledge management tool (Obsidian on my desktop and Mem.AI online). This large collection of has become a resource I can explore, link and tag. In the past couple of years, I have been able to chat with my content using AI tools (e.g., NotebookLM and Smart Connections). The opportunity being able to interact with material I have generated over decades is a very interesting experience and for someone who writes a boon to productivity,

Given the opportunities of reading on a digital device, I think we are at a point where highlighting may have value. Under these conditions, highlighting services as a placeholder for what should be a fairly immediate generation of meaningful notes. The placeholder has two benefits — it marks and saves a location in content that offers the benefit of context should a reader need to make use of the source material later. The marked material is also isolated through highlighting, and this would seem to benefit the note-making process.

One other conclusion for the Ponce and colleagues review of highlighting studies I drew from in previous sections of this post. These authors concluded that the effectiveness of highlighting was greatly enhanced when used in conjunction with more generative learning strategies, such as note-taking or creating graphic organizers. Combining highlighting with these activities showed a notably larger effect size compared to highlighting alone

I suggest it is time to prepare secondary students for these opportunities. I also argue that educators abandon the paper is best assumption. If learning is understood as a process with initial exposure not isolated from studying and review, I cannot see how paper sources have an advantage. Learn to use a digital highlighting and annotation tool and work this tool into your knowledge generation and storage workflow.

If my position makes sense to you, you may find the series of posts I have generated on note-taking to be of value.

Summary

Highlighting has often been dismissed as an effective learning strategy. Here, I argue that this is an outdated perspective based on assumptions related to the use of paper-based content. With digital content, highlighting can be an important first step in the processing of content for comprehension and value over extended periods of time. 

Sources

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to take Smart Notes: One simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking for students, academics and nonfiction book writers

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the public interest, 14(1), 4–58.

Johns, A. (2023). The science of reading: Information, media, and mind in modern America. In The Science of Reading. University of Chicago Press.

Ponce, H. R., Mayer, R. E., & Méndez, E. E. (2022). Effects of learner-generated highlighting and instructor-provided highlighting on learning from text: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 34(2), 989-1024.

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Old folks benefit from social media

I first learned that the association between online activity and health among older individuals may actually be positive from a television news program. Since I spend a lot of time reviewing research related to the use of digital tools, I decided to follow up. Disclosure – I have no expertise in health issues, but I do read a lot of research focused on the cognitive benefits or detriments of technology. I also have considerable personal experience using technology as an older adult, and I thought others may be interested.

There are multiple concerns that technology may have damaging effects that we users may conveniently ignore.

  • Technology appears to discourage physical activity, which may result in weight problems and poor physical conditioning.
  • Technology may reduce face-to-face social interaction and the benefits (emotional and physical) associated with interactivity. The hostility so common on social media sites when it comes to certain issues, such as political discussions, may have resulted in significant divisions within society. 
  • Certain technology tools (AI) may be used in place of the struggle involved with important cognitive tasks (e.g., writing, mathematical problem solving), limiting the learning of important skills.

It is easy to generalize concerns, and it makes some sense that older people are less tech savvy and would be less concerned about the dangers of spending a lot of time online. However, it is always worth collecting the data, and when Baylor and University of Texas at Austin researchers began to look at the published studies,s they concluded that social media activity was actually helpful in multiple areas.

The study that caught my attention was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, which reviewed 57 studies involving more than 411,000 adults across the globe, with an average participant age of nearly 69. The researchers Jared Benge and Michael Scullin used a statistical procedure called meta-analysis which is used to identify a general trend across the work of many other researchers. Most uses of this approach also identify variables potentially differentiating the studies and then examine outcomes found in subgroups associated with these differences to possibly identify important factors that might explain how any relationship between variables identified by the larger study might be explained. Sometimes, such an approach can identify a general explanation based on differences in what the smaller studies show. (Summary of study for public distribution).

This pattern of cognitive protection persisted when the researchers controlled for socioeconomic status, education, age, gender, baseline cognitive ability, social support, overall health, and engagement with mental activities like reading that might have explained the findings.

So, the general conclusion was that more use of social media was related to better physical and mental health. Specific causes cannot be identified in what are correlational studies (more on that at a later point) but the authors speculated there were several possible benefits:

  • Social connectivity – social engagement is known to facilitate mental and physical health so it seems possible to be able to connect with others even with physical limitations or the inability to drive a car. The access to visual connections (e.g, Apple’s FaceTime) offers a more social interaction.
  • Performance enhancement – opportunities such as online banking and shopping encourage independence and keep older individuals more active and involved. Even services that provide assistance with directions keep individuals more active. 

The issue with correlational research

You may be familiar with the phrase correlation is not causation. This means that finding a relationship between one variable (tech use) and another (health variables) does not mean that greater use of your cell phone is responsible for improved health outcomes. You might have immediately made the same observation – what if those with illness or in cognitive decline don’t use their smartphones as much? Researchers can try to statistically control for other variables, but the certainty of the direction of a relationship cannot be guaranteed. The reason more powerful research designs are not applied is easy enough to understand when you think about the topic of this research and many other issues that involve avoiding a negative situation. You cannot ethically create a situation hypothesized to be damaging to see if it really is? 

I decided I should take a look at a couple of the individual studies to see if the design was a simple are “A & B” type of design, and this was clearly the case in some cases.

So, despite the frustration the phrase creates among those seeking a high degree of certainty – “more research is needed”.

Sources:

Benge, J. F., & Scullin, M. K. (2025). A meta-analysis of technology use and cognitive aging. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-15.

Godie, E. A., Elfiky, E. R., & Ibrahim, E. E. (2022). Smartphone Use and Its Relation to Cognitive Impairment and Depressive Symptoms among Elderly People. Assiut Scientific Nursing Journal, 10(33), 188-196

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