It is surprising to learn that in our climate of emphasis on technology skills, little has been done to examine the impact of that technology use on the critical thinking, or problem-solving skills of students who use it. The push to become more digitally competent and more digitally aware and to develop "21st Century" skills is prevalent in the world of educators, but what are the benefits or impact of those skills? How do students benefit from the use of technology? These are not questions that are being asked very frequently. The few studies I found focused on the effect of robotics on student learning, ("The Ideal Science Student: Exploring the Relationship of Student's Perception to Their Problem Solving Activity in a Robotics Context" by Sullivan and Lin, 2012), or the impact of technology on women and girls as they solve problems, ("Education: Coding and Aesthetic Understanding, Computer Science Education and Computational thinking", Good, Kenan and Mirsha, 2016), or examining technologies impact on computational abilities, ("Approaches to Achieving Equity of Outcomes in Computational Thinking and Coding Education", Anderson, 2016). These studies seem to examine the broad impact of technology's use, but not a close up examination of the improvement of any skills or abilities, outside skills specifically tied to technology. Yet, we are devoting hours to improving the technology education of our students; time being the most precious commodity in school. Shouldn't we closely consider the overall benefits, if any, of these lessons and activities? I hope to take a closer look at the overall impact of coding (specifically HTML/CSS) on a student's ability to solve OTHER complex problems outside of coding. Can learn to code help students do a better job on solving complex math equations or puzzles? Can it provide them with more tenacity when approaching other problems: writing a paper, solving long-division, or following the scientific process. As we forge ahead, we must always be looking back and attempting to discern if our steps forward are leading us in the right direction. This study will address important issues facing us on both the local and National level. We are still working on National Standards for technology instruction, most schools relying on the ISTE Standards which were reviesed just last year. California, as yet is still working on adding specific standards for technology instruction to the Common Core document, and thus these questions are essential for all educators.
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AuthorJen has been teaching school for awhile now. She's learned some stuff, but she's got tons more to learn. Archives
October 2017
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