No Child Left Behind has made data-driven decision making a national movement, forcing districts to focus their use of technology on collecting, analyzing, and acting on student data. I believe this is a good thing. In fact, I would argue our current obsession with using
technology for testing and analysis is a necessary detour, and that the use of technology for instruction will ultimately be better because of this journey.
At the first stage of the journey, educators wake up to the
significance of data but still lack the knowledge, skills, or
motivation to analyze it. They begin to see that state accountability
reports and Web sites like www.schoolmatters.com have performance
messages for their schools, but they don't yet understand how to
interpret those messages or craft a realistic plan of action.
At stage two, educators start to use the data behind those reports
and Web sites to zero in on student performance. They scrutinize
students' test results, looking for strengths and weaknesses and rates
of progress—anything that might suggest an opportunity to maximize
achievement and meet NCLB goals. This focus on test scores often leads
to fairly unimaginative uses of technology—like drill-and-kill tutorial
software—to make quick gains. But such efforts don't address the
question of how to sustain achievement over the long term.
Anyone who has spent enough time at stage two knows you don't
sustain improvement in students' performance by focusing on
standardized test scores.
Enter stage three. Schools in this stage concentrate on instruction
and feedback. To support this work, they use instructional management
systems that collect, organize, and analyze classroom assessment data.
They load the systems with curricular, instructional, and assessment
materials teachers can use to support their daily work and customize
instruction. Some also have students routinely complete and submit
classroom work with computers.
That is how instructional technology gets saved. Because
accountability now frames technology's classroom role, the focus is on
productive instructional purposes. Educators at this point seek out
applications that support and extend quality instruction and provide
assessment data as a by-product. For example, the Concord Consortium
offers simulations that teach topics like genetics while automatically
generating formative assessment data. Similarly, ETS has developed an
automated essay scoring tool that gives students more writing practice
and feedback than their teachers can provide alone.
As such innovations multiply and spread, we will see technology
being used to integrate assessment and instruction. The applications
students use will gather and synthesize diagnostic information about
everything they do. This data will provide richer and more reliable
assessments of student achievement than standardized tests, and
teachers will use them in real time to guide their work.
When this happens, technology will be demonstrably part of excellent
teaching and learning. It will be unheard of for affluent and
well-educated communities like Cobb County, Georgia, to reject student
laptop programs as a waste of taxpayer money, as was reported last
month. And the innovative teachers, who will not have ceased their
efforts in the face of NCLB, will find a newly appreciative audience of
colleagues who know why they, too, want to use technology and what
student achievement they expect from its use.
Peter Robertson is former CIO of the Cleveland Municipal School District.
