Efficiency and learning projects
One major emphasis in the resources we are providing you focuses on the uses of technology in learning projects. This is why our approach to projects is so analytical. We suggest that it may be helpful to consider projects or project components in terms of (a) the ease with which what we have described as "the project experience" and "thinking about the experience" are integrated and (b) the intensity of the "thinking about the experience" component.
A project component that will appear repeatedly in our examples involves student use of technology tools to create a representation of what has been learned to inform others. These representations may take many different formats and may incorporate text, images, and video. We would describe such products as externalized representations of understanding and suggest that in creating these representations, individually or collaboratively, learners process their experiences in ways they may not have without the requirement of generating the product. The externalized product also allows the opportunity for personal and external evaluation. The attempt to externalize understanding is helpful in self-evaluation (i.e., metacognition) in that gaps and vagueness become more evident. The product is also available for peers and the classroom teacher to review, offer feedback, and possibly use as the basis for a summary evaluation.
We suggest that there is credible support for this focus from at least two identifiable research areas involving learning activities which are traditionally described as a) writing to learn and b) peer tutoring. We have taken the liberty of describing these topics as authoring to learn and teaching to learn to allow a broader perspective, e.g., the inclusion of multimedia, and to highlight the benefits to the author and teacher as well as the service to others who may benefit from exposure to any products that are created. Often, the processes of authoring and teaching are both involved in projects we describe. The learner creates a product with the intent of helping someone else understand what the learner has learned.
Authoring to Learn. We think that it would be nearly impossible to involve yourself in a major writing project, like the project we have completed and you are now reading, and not strongly believe that learning occurs in the process of certain types of writing. Of course, we also understand the dangers of substituting personal beliefs and values for sound empirical evidence and we would not advocate committing student time to authoring projects unless we could point to a relevant supporting research literature.
Authoring to learn, our more general formulation of writing to learn, seems an example of generative learning (Wittrock, 1974, 1990). The core idea here is that an external activity, writing in this case, requires or at least encourages cognitive activities (internal activities) that result in understanding, improved retention, transfer, or some other desirable educational outcome. The external activity generates productive internal activity. It is probably fair to suggest that the desirable outcomes listed may occur without the additional task, but the task is assigned because of the assumption that it will increase the probability productive cognitive activities will occur in a greater proportion of a group of learners.
Writing to learn has attracted the attention of many researchers, but the various techniques and participant samples investigated have generated mixed results. This inconsistency is common in educational research and assumptions of a simple conclusion likely results in some frustration among those who just want to feel confident that a tactic they apply will be successful. Reviews of research often use a combination of several techniques referred to collectively as "meta-analysis" to both integrate the findings from many individual studies and attempt to identify factors responsible for the variability in outcomes among the studies. So, when applied to research on writing to learn, reviews based on such a meta-analytic approach (Bangert-Drowns, Hurley & Wilkinson, 2004; Klein, 1999) have determined that writing activities have a modest positive impact on achievement. One factor that may influence the impact of writing tasks concerns whether the task encourages the writer to express ideas that are already formed or requires the writer to formulate new ideas. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) differentiate such tasks as knowledge telling and knowledge transforming. Klein (1999) notes that learners are more likely to use already formed ideas when allowed to rely on well structured source content such as a book or a lecture and are more likely to restructure when involved in writing tasks based on what Klein descries as "unrefined" resources; e.g., results of science experiments, historical documents. Klein also claims tasks that require the writer to create a genre-related product are more likely to involve generative processes. For example, a "position paper" assignment might require the writer to take one of several possible positions and then identify the strengths and weaknesses of this position. Working the information available into the structure required of this genre would likely reduce the likelihood a learner could summarize a single source.
So, all writing tasks are not created equal and the design of the writing tasks matters in terms of whether learners process information in a way that leads to deeper understanding and transfer. Tasks that rely on multiple sources and that get beyond summarization to argumentation and explanation have a greater positive impact on depth of understanding (Priemer & Ploog, 2007; Wiley & Voss, 1999). While the terminology here may be new, the logic is pretty straight forward. Writing tasks that require a learner to acquire information, integrate that information across sources and with existing knowledge, and generate a product from that information to inform others are likely to develop a better personal understanding than would have been likely without the tasks.
Teaching to learn. The end goal of authoring to learn, to inform others, sounds very much like teaching. Authoring typically lacks the opportunity for interaction and extended engagement that is typical of effective teaching, but the effort to help someone else understand is similar. Of course, our focus on technology offers many opportunities for both informing and interacting.
The claim then is that teaching represents a generative activity with benefits to both the teacher and the student. We trust there is a certain intuitive appeal in this statement that anyone with any teaching experience can appreciate. Effective teachers seldom go to class cold but rather plan, develop activities, review old sources, and search for new sources. The interaction of teaching results in additional generative activity. Questions require the consideration of unexplored perspectives and answers can force the application of knowledge in new ways. Perhaps questions also identify areas of uncertainty that motivate the search for clarification. Notice all of the "verbs" - these descriptive words are indications of cognitive activity.
The term "teacher" is seldom used to describe K-12 students, but there is a similar concept and a research literature associated with an assortment of strategies described as peer tutoring (e.g., Cohen, Kulik & Kulik, 1982). Again, our focus is on the less commonly emphasized topic of benefit to the tutor (teacher). Meta-analyses find mixed results with what should be a familiar distinction offered as an explanation for the variability in benefits to the teacher. Using concepts very similar to knowledge telling and knowledge building in analyzing the tutoring behaviors encouraged in different situations, Roscoe and Chi (2007) argue the unique benefits of knowledge building to the tutor. Requiring tutors to generate novel or personal examples or connect ideas from multiple sources appear to offer unique benefits beyond tutoring which simply summarized the ideas found in each resource tutors were expected to teach.
To conclude, educators make important decisions when they select learning tasks. While our discussion of efficiency may be a bit unusual in the discussion of classroom methods, we propose that it offers a useful way to think through concerns associated with more experiential learning activities and on a more general level whether the conditions necessary for learning have been satisfied. Among the various uses of technology we explore here, we place a special emphasis on applications of technology that engage students in what we describe as authoring to learn and teaching to learn. We argue that these approaches offer relatively efficient and versatile examples of how can integrate technology tools for meaningful learning.