Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
As teachers, we sometimes have the nice feeling that the method we are using
is “working well.” What this often means is that students are engaged in the activ-
ities: they attend the course, they pay attention to our talk, they argue with each
other, they ask questions, they make suggestions, etc. in short, they are “with us.”
“It works well” is just a personal feeling, a subjective opinion, not an objective
measure. This opinion may rely on cognitive cues: the students' answers indicate
that they understand, they come with original solutions or new ideas, they deliver
satisfactory assignments, they do well at the exam, etc. Finally, “it works well”
also means that the method is compliant with our constraints: the students' work-
load is reasonable, our teaching workload is acceptable, there is no main bug in the
technology, the teaching material can be reused next year, the students are satisfied
(as shown by the course evaluation), as well as the director and the students' parents.
As teachers, we have to care about many of these constraints that we do not really
conceptualize as researchers: homework, parents, discipline, room size, friendship,
security, etc. In summary, there are many conditions for a method to “work well”
and we, as teachers, are happy when it happens.
As researchers, we did not pay that much attention to things that “work well.”
A first obvious critique is that the teacher's opinion that it “works well” may be
unfounded. It may be that students were actually bored while the teacher perceived
them as engaged. It may be that students were highly engaged but did not learn
much through the activity. For instance, the LOGO environment “worked well”
for many years but did not reach its promises in terms of learning outcomes (Pea,
1983; Tetenbaum & Mulkeen, 1984). Similarly, many colleagues stick to lecturing
because, from a classroom viewpoint, it “works well,” that is, it satisfies many of the
constraints we will analyze in this chapter. Educational research reached its maturity
when it replaced stories about methods that supposedly “work well” by empiri-
cal evidence of learning gains (pre-post). The fact that teachers feel their method
“works well” is probably a necessary condition for success, at least for sustain-
ability of the method, but certainly not a sufficient condition. The second critique
against this idea is that “it works well” refers to a broad beam of interweaved factors
that can hardly be disentangled in a formal experiment. Rigorous experiments may
not address more than a few independent variables while “it works well” refers to
many parameters. While design-based research leads to pedagogical methods that
“work well,” they still face founded criticisms with regard to the generalizability of
their findings.
Can we reconciliate the viewpoint of teachers who need methods that “work
well” and the viewpoint of researchers for whom “it works well” can hardly be
viewed as a scientific statement? Wouldn't we be extremely happy as researchers
to know that the teachers involved in our empirical studies continue to use—on
a voluntary basis—the methods we experimented in their class? Wouldn't we be
upset as teachers to experiment for these methods that don't work very well? The
gap between the teachers' and researchers' viewpoint is related to the difference
of scale in their preoccupation. On the one hand, the researcher has to narrow down
his focus to a specific activity or process (e.g. peer tutoring), hopefully isolated from
any other source of influence which would be considered as a bias. It is interesting—
yet dramatic—to note that the “teacher effect” is often viewed as an experimental
