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Interactive Learning Fails Reading Test
motivator_bob writes to tell us the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the latest craze of interactive computer software is actually hurting the education level rather than helping it. From the article: "Parents have also bought into the enthusiasm for technology, spending millions on educational computer games for their young. However, research published in the journal Education 3 to 13 has found that pupils who use interactive programs cannot remember stories they have just read because they are distracted by cartoons and sound effects."
AR had you take a test at the beginning of the year to determine your "reading level", and it had a "reading level" for practically every book out there. Kids were intentionally doing poorly on the test so that they could read 2nd-grade level books. Because the kids were only graded on what they could take an AR test on, these kids were given high grades for reading books that did them absolutely no good (whereas only one other student and I were actually reading above the 7th grade level).
Sometimes, educational software (and software in the schools) can be useful, but the biggest problem is that it seems like we use computers for the sake of using computers, and not for the sake of learning. Despite the fact that AR was KILLING our reading classes, the administration demanded that we continue to use it simply so they could brag about their computer software.
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And make sure that spell check and grammar check are on.
After all book learnin is over rated.
I've been saying this for years. I saw this happening with my kids in the 90's and got them away from it.
And guess what? It's not just kids and "educational" programs,
the same thing applies to adults and movies/TV..
Think about it...
That is most important. Teaching children at a young age to use technology will possibly help them later on in life.
www.IBuyMacs.com
Guys like Edward De Bono have made a career by claiming to have the inside track on creative learning. I've studied epistemology since my mid teens and in answer to the question 'what is learning?' I've acquired a vast ignorance. Ultimately, for me, learning is a nurtured drive with inherent requirements, that is nourished by the new, by information, difference that makes a difference (Bateson). The high of learning comes when one recognizes that nature has given rise to you, an individual with the potential to encompass the principles of life in the small shell that houses your brain.The truth is most people are driven by the more primitive drives and default to being entertained.
Gregory Bateson suggested we can learn to learn, possibly learn to learn to learn; but, first we must experience what it means to learn. I believe that learning is a unique multifaceted experience that, once experienced, can, depending on the individual, entice the practioner ever onward.
The day my older sister took me by the hand and walked me into the nearest library I was hooked. I knew how to, read, loved to read, but had no idea of the universes of knowledge available. Yet even into grade 1 I stubbornly refused to learn to write. I read, I had lots to read, other people were doing the writing, what need had I to write?
Whatever learning is, whether it be as simple as deriving new patterns, or, as profound as Archimedes' Eureka!, we first must introduce children to the joy of learning. Most of them can take it from there.
just my loose change.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
In the future I'm sure our children will be able to learn calculus while playing video games, chatting on their mobile communicators, and picking out their wardrobe for the following week.
Sadly the reality is that kids today don't learn half of what we did many many years ago. I was taught to read by my Dad. He used the book Robinson Crusoe to teach me. I seriously doubt that kids today read anything like that or would ever study calculus. They are to busy playing video games or listening to music. The kids today get most things handed to them with little effort on their part. Probably why a lot of the tech jobs are being exported overseas.
Intelligence in the universe is a constant. The population is growing. You do the math if you still can.
That's what the History Channel is all about. I watch it as much as I can (which isn't much, b/c I don't have cable or anything at my house) just because I love learning new things.
But it's one of those things that depend on the activity and subject. If you teach something in videos or whatever, there are tons of history or language or geometry things that would go along with it. But reading isn't one of those automated-type activities. Reading is learned simply because you see the use for it and have the desire for it.
Kids don't learn to read because they want a good score. They learn to read because they want attention that only another person can give. I'm sure that there are teachers that can work with this program to help their kids, but without that teacher giving their own individual attention to the kids, no computer program can help a kid read.
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I'm all for making learning fun when it can be, but we often sacrifice too much in order to achieve those ends. Sometimes you just have to sit down and memorize your multiplication tables, read your textbooks, and do your problem sets. Sadly, no amount of fun will get you there faster than that.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I'm not sure that I can agree with your oil-and-water viewpoint, which is based on an unequal comparison ("A requires this, B does that"). Nevertheless, it's a step in the right direction, because we do need to distinguish between the two.
I think it's possible (sometimes) both to educate and entertain. My daughter (not quite 3) seems to have learnt quite a bit from some of the videos and TV shows she's watched - letters, numbers, names of things, etc.
And what people find entertaining varies from person to person. For example, I find noodling about with various scripting languages to be a great diversion (currently I've been learning a bit of bash in this way, and it's already proved useful in my work).
However, it is also true that education and entertainment are not always the same thing, and we should quit trying to pretend that they are. And we should quit encouraging our kids to believe that they are.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I must say, the best computer learning game I ever used was Swamp Gas (and Swamp Gas Europe). I memorized random facts about the states (or the european countries) so that I could 'beat' the game. This would then unlock a few relatively fun arcade games. After I ran out of lives, it was back to the learning so I could get back into the arcade.
Oh ya, Oregon Trail was fun too. Stupid Buffalo.
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.-Asimov
already, we do more with our minds on a daily basis than humans of only a half-century ago.
You clearly weren't around half a century ago. I was.
You're full of the arrogance of the modern.
What's more I have spent some time living in ancient fashions, right down to the neolithic. The mind always fills itself to its capacity and just because your modern mind is blind to the stimuli and thought processes needed to survive and prosper in a neolithic world does not imply that those stimuli and thought processes do not exist.
How do you think we got to the modern world?
KFG
My son seemed to have different interests, being much more computer oriented right away - I taught my son his alphabet by helping him tap out the letters on the keyboard. He saw me spending a lot of time on the computer (I started in the days when punched paper tape was a timesaver) so of course he was curious - I decided to encourage the curiosity by playing such simple games. I also love languages, and would speak the names of the letters of the alphabet and the numbers to him in about a dozen different languages - (having to learn them taught me something too!). I always did them in the same order, English, German, French, Spanish, Turkish, etc. (I ignored that some letters were missing from a standard keyboard) - and so it became like a song to him and he'd enjoy typing the letters and saying them out loud.
When he got a little older I looked very carefully at each game before I'd buy it - it wasn't the money, it was that I didn't want things that distracted more than they helped (as any sort of popup during a reading effort would inevitably do). I picked games such as the Logic Puzzles of the Zoombinies (or called something like that) and would help him through a game or two, and then stand back a little. I'd also try to make clear distinctions of when computer time was over, and we'd find other things to do. I would look through bargain bins for old games that I read about - seldom would I pay $40 for some new game.
When he was 10 or so I started showing him text-adventure games - this was perceived as a throwback by some of his friends that would talk about the latest SHINY they had gotten - but having to go through the process of reading something, understanding it, seeing a puzzle, etc. seemed to appeal to him. After a year or so, when he delighted me by starting to ask how they worked, we then together learned the programming process of such games, writing a trivial adventure game and compiling it. The possiblities intrigued him, and he'd explore more - for example he did a high school senior thesis on some book by writing a rather complete adventure game - his teacher was delighted to not read another copy/paste/minimal-edit from WikiPedia. He also learned to program decently, doing a senior project by designing and stitching together several thousand ray-traced images he'd compiled from mathematical description to create a movie of a nanobot exploring and then destroying a cancer cell.
It's worked well for him - he's a 17-yr old college Junior in AstroPhysics now. Obviously he's very bright but what I think worked in the most positive way was my interaction with him and the computer, instead of plug-and-lay leave-him-alone with the machine that seems so prevalent among most approaches to the subject.
My long-distance niece grew up watching TV and ignored - she was barely able to graduate high school.
Have fun - raising a kid is a multiitude of exercises in joy and frustration. You'll make mistakes, and sometimes you'll do brilliantly.
I'm going to politely disagree. I am a high school teacher (seven years junior high 3 years high school) and have yet to find a piece of software that is effective and better than a more traditional approach. In finihing my master's, I did a great deal of research and found that there is no evidence to prove that technology (i.e. computers) improves learning, and in fact, there is much research to conclude the opposite, that computers hinder learning. Todd Oppenheimer's great book is a worthy read.
That being said, there are some great tools that students can use for science, but they are not necessarily "educational", just happen to be good in schools. I know the ed software business is big business, educators, administrators, and parents get all warm and fuzzy over "kids and computers", but nothing beats a good book, and even more than that, nothing replaces the writing process. Kids today barely read at all, and their writing is awful. I rather suspect the inundation of computers and whiz-bang technology has jaded their outlooks. But, there is no substitute for reading a book. The problem with most ed software I've seen is that it is rather limited in developing critical thinking and analysis. Students tend to stay on the low end of Bloom's taxonomy. For example, how do you get them (in my discipline, history) to see cause and effect?
I use Keynote on my iBook all the time, but a teacher using a computer to present material is a far cry from kids playing on the computer. But that's just my experience. 10 years worth.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
1. Bedtime stories
2. Synthetic phonics
3. Visit the library, buy them their favourite books as presents
4. Upgrade to meta-reading using this.
At no point in the above does a computer feature as anything other than a source of readables.
I know that I went from being a terrible speller to being very good as a direct result of computers. I got my first spell checker in the 7th grade. Every teacher, as well as my parents were absolutely sure that spell checkers just make kids lazy. They were sure that I would never learn to spell if I used a spell checker. The fact was that the spell checker would immediately tell me when I misspelled a word, and would also give me the correct spelling. This was opposed to the "traditional" approach, consisting of the student turning in their writing, and a week later getting a paper back with red circles all over it. The typical student would then toss the paper in the trash, never seeing what their mistake actually was, and never finding out the correct spelling.
The funny thing is that prior to my first word processor, I don't believe I ever received a single grade higher than a C on any writing assignment. Immediately following my family getting a word processor, I started getting As. I still attribute some of that to lazy teachers who graded on how pretty your handwriting was, but a lot of it was that changing a single word in the middle of a paper didn't require an extra half of an hour to rewrite the paper.
Maybe I was the exception, but I'm not buying that immediate feedback and shifting effort to the actual task (as opposed to busywork) does not improve the learning process for kids. I also call BS on the "nothing beats a book" line. I can't count the number of times I've heard it. There is only one thing that reading a book gets you that watching TV doesn't. You learn to read better. Now, I am not saying that reading well is not a good thing, but that is all reading has on TV.
Have you seen "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis"? (now called "The Mathematical Journey of the Zoombinis")
:)
It is an excellent introduction to logic, making and testing hypotheses, and more logic and reasoning. It contains 12 puzzles, some of which are highly original. Many of them are challenging and take some time even for adults on the hardest setting.
I'll buy that commercial education-specific software is rarely, if ever, useful for education. (For that matter, any software which is not actually evaluated on its success at performing its stated function is likely to be bad, and educational software generally has this disconnect.)
On the other hand, there is software and there are sites which are actually very useful for learning. For example, I was recently curious as to whether a US president had ever been impeached when his party controlled Congress. Without a computer, I would have had a hard time determining whether the Johnson impeachment, which is generally reported as a separation-of-powers issue, also occurred with an opposing party holding a majority in the Senate (and, if so, whether it was a two-thirds majority). A quick check on Wikipedia reveals that the House was controlled by the Republicans (as of the 1866 election) and Johnson was a Democrat (although Lincoln was a Republican, and Johnson was his Vice-President; thus there is a party-affiliation link to the fact that Congress wanted to prevent Johnson from replacing Lincoln's cabinet appointees). A couple of links further gets the Senate's chronological list of Senators, which would tell me the exact membership of the Senate at the relevant times if it weren't 3 in the morning and I was willing to look through the couple of pages and add up parties. For that matter, it's worth noting that Congress had recently passed a law such that the successor to the presidency would be the (Republican, Lincoln-appointed) Secretary of State.
But the point is that computers can store and index a lot more information than can be conveniently managed in books, which means that students can do primary research for themselves, and investigate cause and effect for themselves, rather than having it reported to them by textbooks. Furthermore, they can essentially skip "knowledge", because the computer can answer for them more questions than any person could hope to know the answer to, and they can build the rest of Bloom's taxonomy on (easy) research skills instead of laboriously gained knowledge.
There's no replacement for a book in presenting a detailed argument on a particular topic, but a computer is far better for researching a topic than any single book or short list of books.