Enhancing the Art & Science of Teaching With Technology. Robert J. Marzano

       Interactive Whiteboards

      The basic distinction between interactive and noninteractive technology tools is that interactive technologies are two-way systems: they provide output in response to a user’s specific input. To illustrate, a film is noninteractive because the response from the audience does not change the trajectory of the plot. An audience member cannot click on the screen, for instance, to elicit different reactions from the characters. On the other hand, a video game is interactive because what happens on the screen is a direct result of the way in which a player manipulates the controls.

      In his meta-analysis of the effectiveness of audiovisual methods in general, Hattie (2009) reported a relatively small effect size of 0.22, indicating a percentile gain of 9 points. However, in a synthesis of research on the effectiveness of interactive video methods, Hattie found a medium to large effect size of 0.52, indicating a percentile gain of 20 points. From this difference, one might reasonably infer that interactive technologies are more likely than noninteractive technologies to lead to positive gains in student achievement.

      In schools, interactive whiteboards (IWBs) are a common form of interactive technology. IWBs use projectors to display a computer desktop onto a large, wall-mounted surface. Using a stylus or a fingertip, users can write, select, move, and interact with objects on the screen. Two studies conducted by Robert Marzano and Mark Haystead (2009, 2010) focused specifically on IWBs. They found an average effect size of 0.44 for 85 independent quasi-experimental studies involving 3,338 subjects. This means that on average, teachers who used IWBs saw student achievement gains of 15 percentile points over what was expected when teachers did not use IWBs. Analysis of video recordings of teachers in the studies provided further detail about the effects of IWBs. Marzano and Haystead (2010) found that teachers whose students exhibited higher achievement integrated the technology better with research-based instructional strategies. Their findings suggested that “substantial increases in student achievement would be predicted with improvements in teacher behavior” (p. 70), particularly with respect to chunking, scaffolding, pacing, progress monitoring, clarity of content depicted on the IWB, and student response rates. All six of these instructional variables were found to correlate with the size of the IWB effect. In summary, when teachers used these strategies more effectively, student achievement gains were greater.

      Other studies on IWBs include Omar López’s (2010) analysis of English learners’ (ELs) academic achievement with and without IWB technology. His results strongly suggested that IWBs increased student achievement among ELs compared to ELs in traditional classrooms without technology. He also found that IWBs narrowed the achievement gap between ELs in IWB-enhanced classrooms and non-ELs in traditional classrooms. IWB technology has also been found to increase student engagement (Beeland, 2002; Smith, 2000), improve student retention of content (M. L. Zirkle, 2003), and enhance teacher planning and organization (Latham, 2002).

       Mobile Devices

      Any pocket-sized, handheld computing device, such as a smartphone, tablet, or e-reader, can be classified as a mobile device. In 2013, Grunwald Associates published the results of a U.S. survey on student use of mobile devices. Of K–12 parents surveyed, 56 percent said they’d “be willing to purchase a mobile device for their child to use in the classroom if the school required it” (p. 3). However, the authors found that only 16 percent of schools allow students to use personal mobile devices in the classroom. Nevertheless, a quarter of all middle school students (28 percent) and half of all high school students (51 percent) carry a smartphone with them to school every day.

      In a review of trends in research, Wen-Hsiung Wu and his colleagues (2012) defined mobile learning as “using technology as a mediating tool for learning via mobile devices accessing data and communicating with others through wireless technology” (p. 818). In other words, the learner does not have to be in a fixed, specific location to engage in mobile learning. The authors reported that 86 percent of the 164 mobile learning studies in their literature review present positive outcomes, although they did not offer an average effect size for these outcomes or define whether these outcomes are related to achievement, motivation, behavior, or some other variable entirely. More specific research on mobile devices can be organized into two categories: (1) smartphones and (2) student response systems.

       Smartphones

      A smartphone is a mobile phone that uses a computer operating system to connect the user to online data. Modern smartphones often have recognizable features such as compact digital cameras and touchscreen interfaces that allow a user to scroll with a finger through a web page or a document. Research by Christopher Sanchez and Jennifer Wiley (2009) and Christopher Sanchez and Russell Branaghan (2011) on the effect of scrolling textual interfaces on cognition and memory has direct implications for the use of smartphones for learning. Sanchez and Wiley (2009) reported that text displayed in a scrolling format is not only harder to understand but also harder to remember than text displayed in a print format, especially for individuals with low working memory: “Nonscrolling interfaces produced significantly better comprehension overall than did scrolling interfaces.… Whereas scrolling did lead to worse performance overall, there was a more pronounced effect for those individuals who had lower WMC [working memory capacity]” (p. 734). Furthermore, the learners in the study “were less able to develop a causal understanding of a complex topic when presented with a scrolling interface than when presented the same information units in discrete pages” (Sanchez & Wiley, 2009, p. 737). In sum, scrolling text is more difficult to read than stationary text.

      Two years later, Sanchez and Branaghan (2011) conducted a similar set of studies to determine whether the small, scrolling displays on mobile devices affect a reader’s ability to reason or remember facts. They found that while “factual recall is relatively unaffected,” there is a significant decrease in performance when readers must use the factual information “to make appropriate decisions or otherwise reason about a given situation” (p. 796). The authors elaborated:

      Small displays produced lower overall reasoning performance, and also increased the amount of time it took to solve the problems relative to a full-size display. This suggests that while factual information gathering is unaffected when done [on] a small device, reasoning performance is negatively affected when done on a small device. (p. 796)

      These results indicate that reading scrolling text or text on a small screen may have negative effects on students’ comprehension and reasoning abilities.

       Student Response Systems

      A student response system, often called a clicker, is a small, handheld mobile device that allows students to respond to teacher questions in real time. The students’ responses are then “immediately displayed on a screen for all to see (usually in the form of a graph), allowing students to receive corrective feedback on their answer as well as compare their answer to peers’ answers” (Blood & Gulchak, 2013, p. 246). While there are several competing clicker devices and corresponding software systems available for purchase, a number of websites—such as Poll Everywhere and Socrative—offer free services that can be used with smartphones or other mobile devices.

      As described by Steven Ross, Gary Morrison, and Deborah Lowther (2010), some instructional advantages of clickers include: “(a) valuable immediate review and feedback for students, (b) immediate data on student progress for teachers to examine and use as a basis for making instructional adaptations, and (c) high engagement and interactivity by students during teacher-led instruction” (p. 21). The capacity of clickers to “give students frequent, integral access to new representational forms and communication options” has the potential to “enable students to better express what they know and can do,” which could make clickers useful for formative assessment (Roschelle, Penuel, Yarnall, Shechtman, & Tatar, 2004, p. 5). Clickers have also been found to increase student engagement (Bojinova & Oigara, 2011).

Perspectives on Educational Technology

      As research on the impacts of educational technology expands, numerous theories and perspectives have emerged regarding the general utility of educational technology. One perspective views technology through a