The Enabling Support Foundation

Education in the 21st Century: Technology and Learning Styles
Bob Zenhausern, Ph.D. Professor
Psychology Department Jamaica, NY 11439 drz@sjuvm.stjohns.edu
A major goal of the 20th century has been the automation and streamlining the 19th Century. The major goal of Education in the 20th Century seems to have been the preservation of 19th Century obsolescence. The traditional "3 R's" of Education need to be modified and a new set of Educational Basics developed if our children are to become effective workers in the 21st Century. A related theme of the paper is the growing need to take individual differences into consideration whether these be based on physical disabilities, learning disabilities, or learning styles.
Technology has made it possible to reach the goal of universal inclusion.
The Growth of Technology
It could be argued that the overriding goal of Technology in the 20th Century was the perfection and automation of the 19th Century. During these past 100 years we have seen a growth from the quill pen to desk top publishing; from laborious hand calculations to calculators and spreadsheets; from hand drawing to CAD; from library card catalogs to World Wide Web. At the same time, the underlying philosophy of Education was the preservation of the 19th Century. Educators have stressed the importance of penmanship, arithmetic tables, rote memory, and grammar above discovery and communication. Children given closed book tests, with arbitrary time limits, where the test taker does not have access to calculators and spell checkers? The skills embodied in those may tests may have been appropriate for the 19th Century workplace, but do not reflect the skills and tools essential for the 21st Century. Children still need to learn the basics, but the basics have changed.
Writing
The complaint that students do not how to write is echoed from the Halls of the Third Grade and the Halls of Ivy. Pre School children want to "write letters", explain things, and tell stories.
And then we start to educate them. Consider First Grade child being taught to write. He or she must complete 2 or 3 pages of filled with the letter "A" and is criticized for sloppiness. As punishment children are forced to write repetitive statements. And then a teacher exclaims, "I do not understand why children do not like to write!" The value of penmanship started to decline with the advent of the typewriter and has dropped precipitously with the pervasive word processor. Spelling and grammar details can be automated and editing is simplified with a word processor so that the student can concentrate on communication. I am proposing that a child learn to write first on a computer and handwriting taught later when the child has better fine-motor control. From a practical perspective, keyboarding skills are much more important in the workplace than handwriting.
Arithmetic
The poor performance in Science and Math has been a growing concern in Education along with a National fear that we will not be able to maintain our technological leadership and innovation. It may be a 19th Century educational philosophy that is at fault. I suggest that children are having more and more problems with science and math, because scientists and mathematicians are using tools that are denied the students. We expect students to understand concepts with paper and pencil that mathematicians and scientists used a computer to discover. An examination of what we call mathematics disability indicates it can be traced to an abiding problem in one branch of Mathematics -- Arithmetic. Children who cannot master their tables, multiplication, long division, etc. are held back from advanced mathematics. Given the widespread use of calculators in the workplace, an insistence on rote calculations is not a realistic preparation for the workplace. I would like to suggest a program based a three-pronged approach to the teaching of mathematics: Intensive experience with approximations, extensive use of electronic calculators and computers, and the availability of mathematical tables for those who wish to use them. In the case of uneven development in these three areas, the child will be allowed to progress differentially so that difficulty in one prong does not interfere with growth in the other prongs.
Retrieval of Information
Retrieval of Information is the new R in Education for those who must survive in the 21st Century. The ability to locate and retrieve information is an essential skill. In the 19th Century, the goal was to cram as much as possible into memory. In the 21st Century, one goal is to cram as much data as possible into computer memory and still be able to find it. Now, instead of memorizing trivia, a person has more time to convert the data to information and find creative uses for that information. The conclusion of this section is direct and to the point.
Students should be taught to use the tools they will need in the workplace. Students should not be tested! A test is a measure of what a student does not know. (Consider what would be said about a test where no one made an error.) Students should be given projects to complete and training on how to use those tools. Then evaluate the project and not how the student used the tools.
My conception of the basics: Children who have mastered Elementary Education (Fifth Grade) will be able to ftp weather satellite image files to incorporate into a desk top published report with statistical analysis on the World Wide Web comparing weather forecasts, actual weather, and satellite photos.
Accommodation of Diversity
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States triggered a wide spread awareness of all types of discriminations, ranging from gender to disability. A second focus of this paper is on the need to consider the individual differences of the learner and accommodate to those differences as much as possible. The strongest case can be seen in the discrimination faced by individuals with cognitive disabilities. There is an underlying bias against those with learning disabilities that does not exist for those with sensory and physical disabilities. The student who cannot see is not blamed for being blind, but the student with a educational disability is somehow seen at fault; often accused of not paying attention or working hard enough. The victim is held responsible for the problem; all would be well if he or she would "try harder". No one says to a blind person, "If you try harder you will be able to see." Rather, we make accommodations in recognition of the specific sensory and physical disability and provide alternative approaches. We accommodate to the disability by teaching how to reach the same goals as the non-disabled using alternative approaches, e.g. Talking Books, Closed Caption, and Computers. The LD person, on the other hand is given remedial drills in what they have already demonstrated they cannot do. If a student has a learning disability, Educators must overcome their teaching disability and find the appropriate accommodation.
The Direct Access approach to reading is an example of such an accommodation. Kalisky, Zenhausern, and Andrews (1990) found that most children who have been termed reading disabled do not learn to read because of the standard strategy used to teach reading interacting with two types of reading disabled individuals. The Phonetic Disabled group has difficulty with the first step of standard reading methods, converting a word to its sound. This can be seen by their poor performance in matching two words on the basis of rhyme despite the fact that they can match on the basis of meaning.
The second type of child is the Semantic Disabled reader who has no problem with the matching of two words on the basis of rhyme, but shows many more deficits in matching two words on the basis of meaning. These children will give a perfect word-for-word rendition of text, but have no comprehension of the meaning of that text. The semantic disabled reader can convert words into their phonetic representation, but there is no conversion of this representation into its meaning. Even non-reading disabled individuals have experienced "reading" text and suddenly realized that they were not comprehending the words that had been "read". The Semantic Disabled reader does this on a chronic level.
These two deficits exhibited by the Phonetic and Semantic Reading Disabled Children conflict with the standard approaches used when teaching reading. Children come to school with auditory comprehension, that is, when the they hear the word "ball" they know it means "a round, bouncy thing". Reading means that when children see the letters b-a-l-l they know it means "a round, bouncy thing". Virtually every reading method is based on the strategy of converting the written word to its phonological counterpart so that meaning is derived from auditory comprehension.
This approach has been termed the indirect phonological route to meaning. The child sees the word, says the word, and understands the word from its sound.
This is not the approach to use with either Phonetic or Semantic disabled children. The Phonetic child cannot take the first step of converting the word to its sound; and the Semantic child can decode the word for sound, but not for meaning.
A successful alternative approach that does not depend on the standard indirect phonological route to meaning has been termed Direct Access because it teaches reading by connecting the printed word to its meaning directly. Direct Access at simplest level presents words and corresponding pictures are on separate index cards. As soon as the student learns to pair the words and pictures the student understands the word. The accommodation for these individuals is simple: allow the student to summarize what is read, or answer question about the text, but do not require him or her to read aloud word for word. In other words, the emphasis should be on comprehension rather than oral rendition.
The effect of match and mismatch between teaching strategies and the strengths and weaknesses of the students is most dramatic in the case of the Learning Disabled, but can play an important role in the learning of everyone. Markman and Zenhausern (1983) found that in a rote learning task, verbal repetition interfered with learning for an identifiable half the class. This is a strategy that is used very often for spelling words and mathematical tables. Could this be related to poor spelling and arithmetic ability?
On a very simple level. Ask a group to image an object and 75 to 90% will spontaneously image with their eyes open. At least half of those reported their image quality decreased when they closed their eyes. And yet one hears in the classroom, "Now close your eyes tight and imagine...." This last point may be trivial but it points to the fact that people learn in different ways. We need to find the ways to teach that maximize their potential of all students. Technology and Accommodation: The Interaction One goal of Education in the 21st Century must be to match the tools of teaching with the skills of students. This could mean a voice synthesizer for a blind child or a spell checker for a poor speller. The match/mismatch paradigm can be seen in the heated debate between users of Macintosh and IBM. Rather than asking which is better for this school or for Education, we must consider the needs of the students. Provide both platforms in anticipation of the demands of the workplace and let the students choose the which to use. The student should be taught the keyboard commands as well as the mouse to accommodate those who do not like the GUI.
Education in the 21st Century must develop the tools for effective education and match both the tool and the tool user to the specific tasks at hand.
Kaliski, M., Zenhausern, R., Andrews, R. (1989) The direct access method of teaching reading and the diagnosis and remediation of reading disability. International Journal of Neuroscience, 44, 103-109.
Maxwell, M. & Zenhausern, R. (1983) Teaching reading to disabled readers by eliminating the necessity for grapheme to phoneme conversion. Paper presented at the Eastern Psychological Association, Philadelphia.