“The motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years, it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.” said Thomas Edison in 1922. Around 1930s it was radio,the idea was you could beam experts directly into classrooms, improving the quality of education for more students at lower cost. And that would mean you require fewer skilled teachers, a theme common to all of the proposed education revolutions, like that for educational television in the 1950s and 60s.
Studies were conducted to determine whether students preferred watching a lecture live, or sitting in an adjacent room where the same lecture was broadcast via closed circuit TV. What would you prefer?
In the 80s there was no debating. Computers were the revolutionary solution to our education woes. They were audiovisual, interactive, and could be programmed to do almost anything you like. Researches suspected that if they could teach kids to program, say how to move a turtle around a screen, then their procedural reasoning skills would also improve. So how did it go? Well the students got better at programming the turtle, but their reasoning skills were unaffected.
Nowadays plenty of things are poised to revolutionize education like, smartboards, smartphones, tablets, and M.O.O.C.s. Those are massive open online courses. And some belief we’re getting close to universal teaching machine, a computer so quick and well-programmed that it’s basically like having your own personal tutor in a machine. A student could work through well-structured lessons at their own pace receiving immediate and personally-tailored feedback, and all without the interference of a meddlesome and expensive teacher. Do these claims sound familiar?
Let’s consider the process of learning. Say you want to teach someone how a human heart pumps blood. Which learning aid do you think would be more effective, an animation with narration or a set of static picture with text? Obviously the animation is better. I mean for one thing it shows exactly what the heart does. For decades, educational research focused on questions like this. Does a video promote learning better than a book? Are live lectures more effective than televised lectures? Is animation better than static graphics?
In all well-controlled studies, the result is no significant difference. That is, as long as the content is equivalent between the two treatments, the learning outcomes are the same with all different media. How is this possible? How can something which seems so powerful, like animation, be no more effective than static graphics? Well for one thing, animations are fleeting and so you might miss something as they go by. Plus, since the parts are animated for you, you don’t have to mentally envision how the parts are moving. And so you don’t have to invest as much mental effort which would make it more memorable. In fact, sometimes static graphics perform better than animations. And I think this points to a really fundamental aspect of education which is, it doesn’t matter what happens around the learner. We are not limited by the experiences we can give to students. What limits learning is what can happen inside the student’s head. That is where the important part of learning takes place. No technology is inherently superior to any other.
Researchers spent so much time investigating whether one medium or technology was more effective than another that they failed to investigate exactly how to use the technology to promote meaningful thought processes. So the question really is what experiences promote the kind of thinking that is required for learning?
Recently, that research is being conducted and we’re finding out some pretty important stuff. I mean it may seem obvious, but it turns out learning with words and pictures together, whether they’re animation and narration or static pictures and text, works better than words alone. Also, we see that anything which is extraneous needs to be eliminated from a lesson. For example, on-screen text competes with visuals, so learners perform better when it is omitted then when it is present.
All of this is not to say technology has had no impact on education. Students and teachers work and communicate via computers. And videos are used both inside and outside of classrooms. But all of this is best characterized as an evolution, not a revolution. The foundation of education is still based on the social interaction between teachers and students. For as transformative as each new technology seems to be, like motion pictures or computer or smartboards, what really matters is what happens inside the learner’s head. And making a learner think seems best achieved in a social environment with other learners and a caring teacher.
(Based on a talk by Veritasium)