Education Development Center, Inc.
Center for Children and Technology
Opportunities for Research on the Organizational Impact of School
Computers
CTE Technical Report Issue No. 7
September 1990
Prepared by:
Denis Newman
BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation
As computers are acquired in
greater numbers in schools, their impact on the social organization of instruction
increasingly becomes an issue for research. Developments in the cognitive
science of instruction, drawing on sociohistorical theory, provide researchers
with an appropriate theoretical approach to cultural tools and cognitive
change, while developments in the technology of computer-supported cooperative
work provide researchers with models for organizational impact outside of
education. The concept of a formative experiment in which schools are supported
in the appropriation of new technology is illustrated by a project that
implements local area network technology in an elementary school. The concept
of appropriation derived from sociohistorical theory highlights how schools
can make use of technology for goals not anticipated by the researcher.
Researchers have been interested in the impact of computers on the social
life of classrooms since the early phases of the introduction of microcomputers
(Hawkins, Sheingold, Gearhart, & Berger, 1982; Levin & Kareev, 1980).
The Office of Technology Assessment (1985) reports, however, that even with
the schools' apparently massive acquisition of microcomputers, there is
still an average student-computer ratio of only 30:1, so that computer use
is little more than an occasional diversion from the classroom routine With
only one computer in a classroom or a small computer lab in the school,
teachers are usually able to appropriate the technology into their current
practices (Cuban, 1986), but prospects for revolutionary changes in schools
resulting from this level of technology are not bright (Cohen, 1988).
Three factors now present researchers with an opportunity to reexamine the
organizational impact of school computers; that is, to observe the ways
in which technology reorganizes classroom interactions, provides for collaboration
among teachers, and affords new instructional designs.
The first factor is the continued acquisition of computers. If the acquisition
of technology continues over the next five years at the same rate as the
last five, many schools will begin to have student-computer ratios that
make computer use common for routine classroom work over a wide range of
the curriculum. Model schools with, for example, 4:1 ratios will be available
in sufficient number to form generalizations about organizational impact.
The second factor is the development of a theoretical framework, derived
from Vygotsky's (1978, 1986) work, which considers the social environment
as an integral part of the process of cognitive change. The framework gives
educational researchers a source of insight into the impact on learning
of different ways of organizing instruction. It also gives researchers a
methodology for studying the change in complex educational environments
through formative experiments on technologies that support different organizations.
The third factor is the technological advances in recent years in computer
systems that serve work groups rather than individual workers. For example,
local area network (LAN) technology is increasingly common in business and
research settings as a means of communicating and sharing data among microcomputers.
The introduction of computer-supported cooperative work technology into
schools raises important issues concerning the kind of instructional organization
the technology will be used to support.
I will illustrate the organizational impact of school technology with a
description of a project intended to create an environment for collaborative
classroom science investigations. Our interest in the use of technology
as a mediator of organizational change derives from the theoretical approach
that links the process of learning directly to the kinds of social interactions
that constitute instruction. Our interest in the particular technology derives
from the current state of the art which, given the growing density of computers
in schools, is beginning to offer an opportunity to use technology for changing
instructional organization. An outline of the theoretical issues and the
technology issues leads us to the methodology of the formative experiment
that is illustrated in the last part of this article.
The Sociohistorical Approach
to Tools and Change
Recent work in cognitive science that is examining thinking and learning
outside of laboratory or school settings (Hutchins, in press; Lave, 1988;
Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989; Resnick, 1987) has kindled an interest
in the developmental theories of Vygotsky, Bruner, and others who have attempted
to integrate the internal developmental processes with the cultural artifacts
and social processes outside the individual (Bruner, 1966; Laboratory of
Comparative Human Cognition, 1983; Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Vygotsky, 1978,
1986). In what is known as the sociohistorical school, cognitive processes
involve tools for thinking, such as writing, or computers, that have
their own historical development. These tools may be internalized, as with
our knowledge of language, or remain external, as with our use of computers.
A concept that distinguishes the sociohistorical school from other approaches
to development is appropriation, a notion introduced by Leont'ev
(1981). Learners can appropriate the culture's tools without recapitulating
or understanding the process by which the tool was created historically.
A tool can, in fact, have quite a different interpretation for the child
and the adult. The same object can play different roles in the two systems
of activity.
The interpersonal cognitive system is important for understanding cognitive
change because (a) culturally elaborated tools play a critical role, and
(b) the activities in which the tools function can be conveyed only through
apprenticeship. Vygotsky (1978,1986) introduced the concept of a zone of
proximal development (ZPD) in which children, with help from others, could
work at problems that were beyond their competence as individuals. The knowledge
and skills that become internalized, in this view, are the interactive processes
by which the problem had been worked on. Appropriation is an important process
in the ZPD, on the part of both the learner and the teacher. Newman, Griffin,
and Cole (1989) describe teaching and tutorial sessions in which the teacher
appropriates the student's actions into her or his own way of understanding
the task. The teacher has to find some way for the student to play at least
a minimal role in the accomplishment of the task and give feedback in terms
of the expert understanding of the task: what the goal is, what is relevant,
why his or her move was not optimal, and so forth. All the student has to
do is produce some move that in some way contributes (or can be understood
as an attempt to contribute) to the task. Seeing how his or her action is
appropriate provides the student with an analysis of task as the teacher
understands it. Thus, knowledge is actively constructed in the social interactions
where the meaning of an action can be changed retrospectively by the actions
of others that follow it (Fox, 1987; Newman & Bruce, 1986).
The concept of appropriation applies also to the educational environment's
adoption of technology. The tools are interpreted in terms of the ongoing
structure of activities. Although tools can serve to amplify an actor's
powers, amplifiers must be understood in terms of the organization of the
activity, not just in terms of individual capabilities (Cole & Griffin,
1980; Pea, 1985). Computers
amplify a teacher's capacity for a variety of kinds of instruction, not
by changing the teacher but by changing the instructional activity from,
for example, one in which the teacher presents a book-based lesson to one
in which students work at a simulation in small groups. The teacher's goal
of conveying an understanding of some physical system is more efficiently
achieved through a change in the organization of instruction.
The changes that take place when technology is appropriated by an environment
may appear to be minimal if the tool is fit into the existing structure
(Cuban, 1986). Mehan (1988), for example, described elementary classrooms
that were organized into "centers" that simply made the classroom
computer another center. Although the school must appropriate the technology
in order to use it at all, under some conditions the school can appropriate
a technology that, in turn, helps to change the educational environment.
This process may result in a new interpretation of the tool as well as a
constructive change in the classroom activity (Bruce & Rubin, in press).
The new technologies that are designed for supporting different forms of
social organization present an interesting challenge for schools.
Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work
The use of computers in research laboratories and business offices involves
technology designed to aid in the workplace organization. The fact that
there is a domain of research and development concerned with the organization
of the computer-mediated environment provides additional incentive to explore
the possible parallels with the educational environment. In discussions
of computers in education, the term environment usually stands for
a microworld program that lets the student explore an idealized simulation
of a real physical or mathematical system. The term educational environment,
in contrast, refers to the social world in which any such technology functions.
The whole environment can simulate a real social environment, such as a
research laboratory or a factory, by using technology in analogous ways.
Research on the role of technology in constructing such simulations can
draw on practical work in creating real environments.
Over the last few years, researchers and technology developers have established
a new domain concerned with what has come to be called computer-supported
cooperative work (CSCW 86,1986; CSCW 88,1988; Galegher, Kraut, &
Egido, in press). The domain includes work on electronic mail, video conferencing,
distributed databases, group schedulers, and collaborative hypertext environments.
Xerox PARC, for example, has explored a system for supporting collaborative
research and writing in a hypertext system (Trigg, Suchman, & Halacz,
1986). The integration of written communication with the structure of research
notes provides a important model for LAN-based collaboration. Xerox researchers
are also designing a system to support face-to-face design meetings (Stefic,
Foster, Bobrow, Kahn, Lanning, & Suchman, 1987). Research in this area
necessarily moves beyond testing the human-machine interface because the
technology is embedded in the social organization. For example, Engestrom,
Engestrom, and Saarelma (1988) describe the changing work assumptions of
doctors in a medical clinic in which patient records are made a shared resource
through computerization. As Grudin (in press) points out, in the absence
of analyses of social change and conflict, many groupware applications fail
because the designers are naive about the organizational context, very often
ignoring the inconvenience that subordinates must endure for the convenience
of supervisors.
In the adult world, computers are commonly used in the context of work where
software tools are used to create, analyze, and communicate information.
School computer use often follows quite a different model. This is especially
true for local area network technologythe core of many computer-supported
cooperative work (CSCW) applicationswhere the connection among school computers
is used as a convenient way to deliver software to individual computers.
School computer use is often program-based rather than information-based,
as in office settings. This orientation is seen clearly in computer-based
environments such as integrated learning systems (Office of Technology Assessment,
1988), which provide graded sequences of instructional programs to cover
large portions of the curriculum and provide teachers with control and monitoring
functions. Likewise, commercially available LAN systems designed for schools
present students with a menu of programs to choose from
where the teacher has limited student access to a particular set of programs.
In the adult world, in contrast, access to sets of information is of greater
importance than access to a wide variety of programs.
The new field of CSCW thus provides both a technology with potential application
to schools and a research base, often including ethnographic analyses, which
critically assesses the technology in terms of the organization of the work
setting. The approach often taken is that any work in which computers are
used is organized socially even if the hierarchical relationships might
not be cooperative (Bannon & Schmidt, 1989). Thus, CSCW research is
helping to conceptualize technology as part of socially organized work activity.
Of particular importance are the growing number of studies that analyze
workplace learning and organizational change as a result of the introduction
of technology.
Formative Experiments on the
Educational Environment
The continuing increase in the number of school computers makes their impact
on classroom organization of increasing practical concern for educators.
Models for how such reorganization might be accomplished technically, along
with a theory of cognitive change that includes the social organization
of instruction, make experimentation also a practical matter for researchers.
The technology for supporting social organization combines with a theory
in which learning is social and mediated by technological tools to suggest
a methodological approach in which the technology is put to use in actual
instruction.
A formative experiment can involve elaborate arrangements for teacher training,
curriculum development, and production of classroom materials to create
an environment in which students and teachers can confront instructional
tasks. Working in real classrooms rather than laboratories is essential
because the organizational impact is the topic. But a formative experiment,
in the sense used here, provides other advantages over traditional experimentation.
In a formative experiment, the researcher sets a pedagogical goal and finds
out what it takes in terms of materials, organization, or changes in the
technology to reach the goal. Instead of rigidly controlling the treatments
and observing differences in the outcome, as in a conventional experiment,
formative experiments aim at a particular outcome and observe the process
by which the goal is achieved (P. Griffin, personal communication). This
format is commonly used in formative evaluation of software (Hawkins &
Kurland, 1987) where the designer iteratively improves the product until
it is successful in terms of appeal and effectiveness. If the environment
rather than the technology is the unit of analysis, changes in the instructional
interactions, changes in teacher roles, and other ways that the educational
environment is changed are observed. The format of the formative experiment,
within the context of a classroom or schoolwide intervention, can be used
to examine the interactions among students and teachers within small groups
as well as in the larger issues of restructuring. The changes in organization
brought on by technological support can be understood also as changes in
the support for cognition, that is, as new zones of proximal development
that amplify the possibilities for instructional interactions.
Different pedagogical goals will suggest different approaches to large-scale
computer use and will require different kinds of technological and other
support. A pedagogy emphasizing the acquisition of basic skills suggests
the use of an integrated learning system in which skill practice is individualized
and sequenced. As Cole and Griffin (1987) report, such systems are increasingly
found in schools serving disadvantaged populations where concern for test
scores drives the agenda for computers. In contrast, a pedagogy emphasizing
apprenticeship as a means of attaining higher cognitive skills and understanding
(Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989; Resnick, 1987) suggests modeling school
computer use on adult work activities. Each vision of education includes
a unique image of how computers function in the classroom organization.
Different kinds of support will be required to create various desired environments.
Researchers conducting formative experiments attempting to achieve a particular
organizational goal can report the level of effort required to achieve it.
This notion of a formative experiment resembles the way that the ZPD concept
is often used in the context of tests of cognitive ability where the amount
of help the subject needs to reach a criterion performance provides the
measure of the subject's place within the zone. The use of static end point,
however, although a necessary part of testing, is not inherent in the
ZPD theory (Campione, Brown, Ferrara, & Bryant, 1984). In studying the
process of cognitive change through observations of the ZPD interactions,
it is equally important to understand where the learners can get a certain
amount of help. Not all learners will get as far or go in the same direction;
many end points are possible since the learner is also an active appropriator
of the tools the teacher provides. That is, learners make use of the culture's
tools in their understanding of their own tasks, thus reorganizing and amplifying
their own capacities.
Whatever the pedagogical theory motivating the experiment, the outcome to
be observed must include how the environment becomes organized differently
as it appropriates the technology and other resources. The environment may
transcend its initial goals. It may also retain goals and organization in
spite of the technology designer's concerted efforts to support alternative
models. It will not be possible to impose an entirely foreign model of computer
use on the schools. For example, the model of the ''hi-tech'' office may
not transfer to schools well even if the same technology were available,
because the task of learning as opposed to performing known functions may
require different ways of interacting with the technology and cooperating
with peers. In a formative experiment, the researcher can learn much by
trying to create a different kind of environment in terms both of the supports
required to approach the goal and of the environment's appropriation of
that support to go in unanticipated directions.
The study reported in the next section illustrates changes in a traditional
educational environment after the introduction of technology modelled on
computer use in scientific research. Observations of organizational changes
show how a formative experiment must track the way the environment makes
use of the intervention.
A Formative Experiment on a
School LAN Environment
For the last four years, the Earth Lab project has been designing, implementing,
and observing the effects of a LAN system intended to facilitate collaborative
work in elementary-school earth science. Our plan was to create a
prototype LAN system and demonstrate it in a New York City public school
using an earth science curriculum (Newman & Goldman, 1987). The
peda
gogical rationale was that students should use technology the way real scientists
do: to communicate and share datathat is, to collaborate. In this project,
we used educational technology specifically to change the educational environment
from one that discouraged collaborative work among students to one in which
collaborative work was used routinely. The goal of the formative experiment
was an increase in the frequency of collaborative work. We were prepared
to modify the design of the technology, introduce new software, develop
curriculum materials, and conduct staff development workshops as needed.
Developing the Environment
A year-long formative experiment was completed in June 1987. A LAN connected
the 25 Apple IIe computers in the school to a hard drive, which allowed
for central storage of data, text, and programs. The Bank Street Writer
word processing program was enhanced with an electronic mail system (Newman,
1987). The Bank Street Filer was another basic tool that made it possible
for students to create databases that could be accessed.from any other computer
in the school.
Databases were used extensively both inside and outside the earth science
curriculum. During the lunch hour, students invented databases of their
favorite action figures. In social studies, students researched almanacs
and other sources to fill in databases about countries of the world and
figures from Black history. In earth science, they examined databases of
dinosaur fossils and earthquakes, and created a database of the weather
readings that small groups of students collected over a three-month period.
The primary means of supporting collaborative groups was through the management
of the data organized by groups and individuals. This was the role of Earth
Lab's network interface, which made it easy for individuals or small groups
to store and retrieve pertinent data. Students and teachers could be assigned
to any number of workspaces. For example, workspaces were set up for pairs
of students to work on writing assignments together. Other workspaces served
schoolwide clubs, such as the Young Astronauts. Each individual also had
a personal workspace. The science teacher, who had the students for two
periods a week, divided the class into groups of three or four to conduct
investigations in the science lab. The science groups gave themselves names
that were used for group workspaces on the network. Students
shared different data with other students or groups in the school. A student
may have had data shared with a science group, with a noon-hour club, and
with the whole c!ass. It would not have been possible for each student to
have data on a floppy disk because the social organization of the data access
required that multiple routes be possible into the school's database.
Earth Lab is unique among school networks in its orientation to data rather
than to programs. The interface presented lists of projects and work groups
to choose from and only then presented a list of programs with which to
operate on the data. It also was designed fundamentally for collaboration
because data are accessed by groups and the word processor made it as easy
to send a file to somebody else as to save it in a group or individual directory.
Observations of Changes
in the Environment
Along with the technology, we introduced a year-long earth science curriculum
designed in collaboration with the teachers (Brienne & Goldman, 1989).
Many of the activities were designed for student communication and collaboration,
so we expected those features of Earth Lab to be utilized.
What we observed was both more and less than our initial expectations. There
was no radical transformation of the schoolthe innovation took effect
slowly. In several areas, the way the system was used surpassed our initial
expectations. The following examples are not intended to provide quantitative
evidence of changes but to illustrate the mechanisms by which change can
occur with this technology.
Network mediation of teachers' collaboration. Over the year,
there was substantial movement toward more small-group work. We found the
science groups that originated in the science lab being used by the classroom
teachers for a variety of social studies research activities, some of which
were unrelated to the earth science curriculum. The network system produced
these changes in an unexpected way: It made it possible for all teachers
to assign classroom work to the groups created by the science teacher. The
science group workspaces were a convenient means of organizing small-group
projects in other curriculum areas. The science groups became a resource
across the school. There had never been a mechanism by which a social organizational
structure created by one teacher in this school could be used by other teachers
as a resource for managing instruction (Newman, Goldman, Brienne, Jackson,
& Magzamen, 1989).
Coordination of students' science investigations. When
a shared database came into play, our application of LAN technology
naturally seemed to invite coordination in which students contributed to
some larger quest for knowledge, because it was easier to give common access
to the same database than to maintain separate copies for each individual
or group (Newman, et al., 1989). An example is provided by our weather data
collection project. Each small group took turns collecting the data for
a different day and contributing to a shared database that was later used
to ascertain correlations between the variables, such as pressure and cloudiness.
The whole data set became the object of group discussion of relationships
that could not be found in the individual contributions. This coordination
around a shared database was a new activity structure that emerged with
the LAN technology.
Transporting work between contexts. We expected that projects would
be started while the class was in the computer lab and continued in the
classroom. We found that the students were taking this flexibility another
step: We observed two students working together at a classroom computer
on individual book reports. They had not finished when it was their class's
turn to go to the computer lab. Instead of dropping their work, they brought
their notes with them and asked if they could continue their work at a lab
computer while the rest of the class worked on other assignments. The students
logged on and called up the file on which they had been working. The boundaries
between one class period and another became permeable. This permeability
was used by the students to pursue their tasks on their own initiative.
Network use for students' own work. Many students used the system
extensively for their own work in addition to the work assigned as part
of instruction. Students developed a greater sense of ownership of their
workspaces than we had anticipated. Some students accumulated hundreds of
files in their personal workspaces over the course of the year. Earth Lab
was also used for student-initiated collaborative work such as science fair
projects, which were a source of great pride for many groups of students.
Their appropriation of the
technology also was evident in end-of-the-year interviews. For example,
one student suggested having workspaces for which students could determine
access privileges, in order to make it easy to gain access to
work one student was doing with another student. This was an
invention based on a need that arose in personal attempts at collaboration.
Use of electronic mail. The communication system built into the word
processor was used extensively for both academic and extracurricular communication
(Goldman & Newman, in press). In the earth science curriculum, we developed
activities in which the science groups worked on a weekly think-tank question
and mailed in their replies, and in which the groups mailed questions about
their science studies to the other groups. Beyond these structured activities,
the communication system opened additional new channels of communication.
For example, students and teachers carried on individual conversations,
a format that seldom occurred in the regular classroom. Many students used
the system for private social communication, and some students carried on
extensive exchanges with other people, including adults over the telecommunications
connection (Goldman & Chaiklin, in preparation).
Summary and Next Steps
Common to these observations is the perception that students had a place
in the computer system, namely their individual and group workspaces containing
their project data, which was not dependent on having an individual computer
or being in a particular classroom. Both students and teachers made use
of the workspaces as a bridge between school contexts. The extent to which
teachers and students appropriated the system into their own work gives
us reason to believe that systems like Earth Lab are sustainable in the
educational environment. The system that we installed in the school was
to some extent modelled on the use of technology in research labs, but the
system that emerged had characteristics quite specific to schools; for example,
the coordination of small groups, the teacher collaboration, and the use
of workspaces rather than personal workstations. Our formative experiment
succeeded in using technology to increase the likelihood of collaborative
work groups, but we also discovered that a critical function of LAN technology
in schools is to make a more seamless connection between school contexts.
The next stage of our work on school LAN environments will be to reformulate
the goal of the technology from increasing collaboration to increasing use
of projects that cut across the usual curriculum divisions. Such projects,
whether individual or collaborative, can break down the usual compartmentalization
of the school and give students a sense of place in the educational activities
independent of tasks assigned by specific teachers. To support this approach,
it will be useful to create tools that will support the students in managing
and coordinating their investigations (Newman, 1988). We suspect that the
solution to the teachers' difficulties in managing instruction involving
collaboration among the students and with fellow teachers is to provide
students with tools to assume some of the burden, rather than providing
teachers with tools with which to gain greater control. Future iterations
of design and formative experimentation will further refine the design and
continue to explore the changes that are possible in the school environment.
Conclusions
The formative experiment in one school provides information to guide the
further design of school LAN environments. It also illustrates features
of a research approach that can take advantage of the opportunities
to study the organizational impact of the emerging technology. First, the
unit of analysis is the classroom or school; hence, it is necessary to experiment
in real settings over a period of time sufficient for the environment to
appropriate the technology. Second, the logic of a formative experiment
in which the experimenter analyzes the support required to reach an initial
goal must allow for the goals to change as the environment appropriates
the technology. The technology is treated not as the cause of change, but
as something that can be used by the school as well as the researcher to
support change. As research turns to more fine-grained analyses of the instructional
interactions that constitute these changes, the sociohistorical analysis
of classroom learning (Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989) provides a link
between the school or classroom as the unit of analysis and the teacher-student
or peer interaction as the unit of analysis.
Systematic research will be needed to explore the conditions under which
a technology system best functions. For example, the ratio of students to
computers, the support and training
of teachers, the grade level and content of instruction may be important
factors in the success of an environment like Earth Lab. The work undertaken
by the Center for Technology in Education (Bank Street College of Education)
and the Literacies Institute (Education Development Center) with their collaborators
at Bolt Beranek and Newman includes a series of experiments to elucidate
how different designs of educational environments contribute to success
in terms of learning, cooperation, motivation, and so on (Collins, in press).
Collins argues that these investigations can lead to a "design science"
that is more akin to aeronautics than to natural science because it will
attempt to find out what factors make a difference given specified goalsjust
as in aeronautics the goal is to discover how different designs contribute
to life, drag, and maneuverability. It is essentially a science of the artificial
as Simon (1981) describes it.
Earth Lab contributes to the design science several hypotheses concerning
variables likely to have an effect, such as student-computer ratio, consistency
or portability across classroom/lab contexts, and curriculum activities
structures. Although the rationale for the design science is expressed in
the language of independent and dependent variables, it deeply involves
the issues of classroom organization and support for change in experiments
that are formative in character. In practice, tinkering and careful observation
of how far the school goes with the support provided replaces the definition
of experimental conditions and detailed prespecification of dependent measures.
The current state of the design science of education makes it difficult
to specify a priori the goals or.objectives of all intervention because
we do not know what it is possible to achieve with technology or
even what will be necessary in terms of cognitive skills, motivation,
or community membership in order to address future needs of society. Research
on the organizational impact of school computers can proceed by defining
plausible goals for the advanced technology becoming available for schools,
but remaining open to the emergence of new goals. The analysis of the intervention
can contribute to our understanding of the educational process by clarifying
how technology helps sustain zones of proximal development that will support
students and teachers
in achieving their educational goals.
Author's Note
For their comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Michael Cole, Allan
Collins, Marilyn Quinsaat, and Chip Bruce. Earth Lab was supported by the
National Science Foundation, Grant No. MDR 8550449. The preparation of this
paper was supported by the Literacies Institute under a grant from the Mellon
Foundation to the Education Development Center and the Center for Technology
in Education under Grant No. 1-135562167-Al from the Office of Educational
Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, to Bank Street College
of Education.
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