Improving the Learning Experience Through Technology
Educational technology (Edtech) has the potential to leverage the main pillars of learning identified by the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, and thus to improve students’ learning experience. Big data allows for the personalization of content which leads to better student attention and engagement, necessary to acquire new knowledge. Moreover, students can enjoy continuous feedbacks on their online works, and this will accelerate the learning process, but also a precious help to consolidate this knowledge, mainly through repetition. Edtech is a great opportunity for better student learning: not only can they learn more, but Edtech can also decrease inequalities among classes. On the teacher side, Edtech broadens the available teaching resources while letting more time for the educator, not only to transmit knowledge, but also to individually guide the students in their learning journey.
Learning by using technology at school or at home remains quite controversial. While some are not convinced about its efficiency or even refuse anything that involves screens, others are more willing to try it. Thanks to these brave pioneers, research has been able to map most of the benefits students can enjoy from using new technologies. We review below the main advantages of Edtech: retaining student attention, engaging, personalizing content, receiving continuous feedbacks and learning soft skills.
What Does Learning Engagement Mean and how Can it Be Improved with Technology?
Terry Heick, founder of the Edtech blog TeachThought identified 5 levels of students engagement :
● Authentic Engagement: Students are immersed in work that has clear meaning and immediate value to them (reading a book on a topic of personal interest). Characterized by: persistence, sustained inquiry, self-direction, playfulness with content, and unprompted transfer of understanding
● Ritual Compliance: The work has little or no immediate meaning to students, but there are extrinsic outcomes of value that keep them engaged (earning grades necessary for college acceptance). Characterized by: clear effort; some creativity; focus on directions and task completion in order to meet extrinsic standards for motivation
● Passive Compliance: Students see little or no meaning in the assigned work but expend effort merely to avoid negative consequences (not having to stay in during recess to complete work). Characterized by: minimal effort made only to mitigate ‘consequences’ or other negative ‘punishers’; no creativity, genius, curiosity, or transfer of understanding
● Retreatism: Students are disengaged from assigned work and make no attempt to comply but are not disruptive to the learning of others.
● Rebellion: Students refuse to do the assigned task, act disruptive, and attempt to substitute alternative activities.
Of course, the teacher’s ultimate goal is to make sure the students are at least at the ritual compliance level, at most at the authentic engagement level. The more a student is engaged and attentive, the better he will learn what he is being taught. These two characteristics indeed represent two of the four pillars of learning, developed by the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene :
- In cognitive science, attention is the set of mechanisms by which the brain selects information, amplifies it, channels it and deepens its understanding. As a result, an inattentive child will not see the object that requires his attention, nor will he understand it and in turn will not be able to learn.
- The engagement reflects the refusal of passivity and the exploration with curiosity of a subject. On this point, according to the American phycologist Henry Roediger “Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned”.
Going back to educational technology, it can help capture learners’ attention by tapping into their interest and passions, as pointed out by the Californian office of technology education. Technology enables learning experiences that are more engaging and relevant.
How Can We Engage the Students of a Same Class, despite their Differences in Level and Interests?
Through digital personalization: digital resources can personalize learning by using big data. Conventionally, learning resources were published in books and were the same for all learners. With digital resources however, every student can learn at a different pace, style of presentation, or type of content as pointed out by the US Education Department.
Being able to customize activities and learning processes not only increases engagement and attention as mentioned above, but it enhances the learning process itself. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, of the MIT, led a meta-analysis of 126 statistical studies, called Will Technology Transform Education for the Better in 2019 and reached that conclusion:
“Educational software programs designed to help students develop particular skills have shown enormous promise in improving learning outcomes, particularly in math. Targeting instruction to meet students’ learning levels has been found to be effective in improving student learning, but large class sizes with a wide range of learning levels can make it hard for teachers to personalize instruction. Software has the potential to overcome traditional classroom constraints by customizing activities for each student”.
All in all, by personalizing the learning, educational technology is a good way to reduce inequalities within a class.
Besides Engagement and Personalization, Is there a Specific Feature that Technology Could Bring to Students that Could Dramatically Improve their Learning Experience?
Let’s go back to the neuroscience and the four learning pillars of S.Dehaene. The third pillar of learning is about continuous feedbacks. According to the neuroscientist, the quality and accuracy of the feedback we receive determines the speed at which we learn. Testing at regular intervals have positive effects since it exploits one of the most effective strategies that the learning sciences have discovered: the spacing of learning. Distributing the training periods rather and clustering them is a golden rule in learning.
Then, regularly measuring learning is absolutely necessary to master anything, but it is currently too rare and not specific enough with traditional methods.
As highlighted by the Californian office of technology education, “Technology can help us imagine and redefine assessment in a variety of ways. Problems can be situated in real-world environments, where students perform tasks, or include multi-stage scenarios that simulate authentic, progressive engagement with the subject matter. Teachers can access information on student progress and learning throughout the school day, which allows them to adapt instruction to personalize learning or intervene to address particular learning shortfalls.”
Also, technology-enhanced questions allow students to demonstrate more complex thinking and share their understanding of material in a way that was previously difficult to assess using traditional means. Technology-based assessment also offers real-time reporting of results, letting the students and teachers understand what their strengths and weaknesses are.
Finally, the last pillar of the learning process is consolidation of knowledge. Consolidation is about moving from a slow and conscious treatment with effort to a rapid and automatic functioning. Motor activity is transferred to the motor cortex and especially to the basal ganglia. So, consolidating learning means making brain resources available for other purposes.
For example, when we were young, we all struggled when learning how to walk, but from the day we could definitively walk, it was no longer an effort. A more scholarly example would be the multiplication tables that we have learned in primary school. It is (with little practice), no longer an effort to remember how to multiply simple numbers we were once struggling to compute.
To consolidate knowledge, repetitions and practice are necessary. In a classroom, it can be tiring, if not impossible, for a teacher to repeat the same things over and over again and create more exercises. This is where technology intervenes and where it can be a wonderful tool for repetitive tasks.
For example, to acquire the phonology skills, essential to start reading, an adapted digital tool can tirelessly repeat the pronunciation of a particular phoneme while presenting the child its spelling at the same time. This is the main activity of Lalilo.
Are there Competencies Best Addressed by Technology rather than Traditional Teaching?
First of all, we should be crystal clear about the fact that technology will never replace teachers. On the contrary technology can and should offer tools that leverage the knowledge transmission and allow for a more personalized teaching. It can help educators to have a more humane education: with the help of some tools, they would be more able to spend some time at being guides and coaches for the students rather than only transmit knowledge. But the pedagogy and experience of teachers will always be necessary to help children to learn.
It is nonetheless true that some competencies can be hard to teach, and that is where technology come into play.
A study led by the BCG in 2015 on the new Vision for Education highlighted the new competencies and skills that would be necessary for succeeding on the trade market in the 21st century.
Those competencies were: critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, communication skills and collaboration. And the skills were curiosity, initiative, persistence, adaptability, leadership and social and cultural awareness.
Yet, these competencies are rarely addressed and measured at school.
Educational technology is thus a great opportunity to work on interacting with peers, handling conflicts, resolving disputes, or persisting through a challenging problem since virtual environments and games can help increase empathy, self-awareness, emotional regulation, social awareness, cooperation, and problem solving while decreasing the number of behavior referrals and in-school suspensions as mentioned again by the Californian office of education.
It turns out that a lot of digital tools are based on these skills and offer many opportunities to develop them. “Serious games” are a great example since they imbed pedagogical learning in a fun game, where players are asked to respect some rules and adapt their strategy to solve a final problem, knowing that they either have to cooperate, or be in competition with another.
We can conclude this part by quoting Marie-Christine Levet, co-founder of Educapital, “the way of working has changed into something more collaborative, agile and creative. We need to train our kids so that they can fit tomorrow’s society” and technology seems to be the best solution .
What Are then the Main Opportunities Brought by Technology for Students Learning Outcome?
Technology in education is an opportunity to deepen and adapt the learning process, but also to broaden the possibilities of learning.
Today’s technology offer powerful capabilities for creating high-quality learning resources including visualization, simulation, games, interactivity, intelligent tutoring, collaboration, assessment, and feedback as stated in one US Department of Education’s report.
Technology also offers new possibilities to learn more at a lower cost. For example, as explained by the UK Department of Education, 3D visualization system can supplement traditional laboratory-based lessons on anatomy and dissection. Touch screen can increase student participation by allowing them to explore the complex relationships between different parts of the body which would not otherwise be possible.
As a practical example, this concept of experimenting in a digital environment rather than in a physical one is the main business of Labster.
Labster is a virtual laboratory that makes it possible to build scientific simulations using 3D technology and virtual reality.
Technology in education provides students and teachers with a great opportunity to learn and teach more efficiently, to pass on knowledge and skills in a smoother way.
First, digital tools can enhance learning processes by capturing the attention of students, by engaging them, by assessing them regularly and accurately and helping them consolidate their knowledge.
Then, educational technology offers broader resources and broadens the possibilities of learning experiences.
Finally, by personalizing the learning experience, digital tools offer more time to educator not only to transmit knowledge, but also to put on the students’ coach cap, while making sure that inequalities in learning between students keep decreasing.
