John Richard Schrock was a professor of science education at a Emporia State University for many years. He also taught in middle and high schools, as well as in Hong Kong. He frequently writes about education issues.
Screen Reading and Online Coursework Inferior
The forced closure of classrooms and shift to online learning from home has revived the hopes of big Ed-Tech companies that they can regain some legitimacy in education. Meanwhile, the general response of teachers and professors is exposing their extensive negative experiences with distance learning.
In the early 2000s, computer enthusiasts predicted the end of “brick-and-mortar” K-12 schools; students would study from home in their pajamas, using online links to teachers who would also teach from home. New digital readers were predicted to totally replace printed books by 2015. And massive open online colleges (MOOCs) would deliver all coursework online and free, replacing university coursework and making college classrooms obsolete a decade ago.
None of these predictions came true. Our armed forces kept track of their training dropout rate for high school students who graduated from online high schools; they performed as poorly as GED students who never completed genuine high school. Citizens who bought digital book devices temporarily increased but then fell back to a smaller number who found advantages in enlarged texts or backlit nighttime reading for recreation.
But university students need intense “deep reading.” Using on-screen textbooks meant printing off the text to avoid eye strain. The vast majority preferred printed texts for in-depth study and comprehension. Ironically, the high cost of college textbooks was due to the publishers covering the cost of added electronic services. American college textbook publishers ignored student concerns and moved to all-online texts in order to pay for tutors, course outlines, quizzes and testing services as professors were evaluated more on research and less on bothersome teaching.
While K-12 administrators found it easy to buy the latest electronic gadgets and sit youngsters in front of screens to impress naive parents, the actual evaluations of student learning on the NAEP, ACT, SAT and other measures show less, not more learning is occurring with on-screen media.
And while the Chronicle of Higher Education just came out with a clueless recommendation that universities should begin making comparisons of online learning with standard face-to-face teaching, there is already over two decades of solid research. It confirms what most teachers and professors already know: face-to-face teaching and reading-print are clearly superior.
In the last two decades there have been hundreds of rigorous studies comparing reading on screens to reading print. A “meta-analysis” is an analysis of previously published research articles and data, selecting just those studies that meet rigorous research criteria. There have been three major meta-analyses, including “Reading From Paper Compared to Screens: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” by Virginia Clinton and just published in 2019 in the Journal of Research in Reading.
As with the prior studies, she found there was a statistically important benefit to reading print for reading performance, metacognition and efficiency. And despite the fact that online learning using screens has now been in operation in the U.S. for over 20 years, surveys of college professors who have experienced both conventional classroom teaching and online delivery still prefer face-to-face classroom teaching by over two-thirds, a percentage that has not budged for a decade.
We also now know that the student who listens and then writes out class notes understands much more than the student who is transcribing the words they hear a teacher speak onto a laptop, a relatively thoughtless typing process.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) compares educational systems of developed countries and administers the international PISA, a test that involves 15-year-olds across 31 nations. OECD found that students who used computers had both lower reading and math scores. “Those that use the Internet every day do the worst,” said Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills and author of the report. While that study was published in 2015, the Reboot Foundation released a study in June 2019 that followed up using the most recent data and again found a negative connection between each nation’s performance on the PISA and their students’ use of technology in school. The more they used computer screens in schools, the lower the nation’s rank in educational achievement. In addition, the Reboot Foundation found a negative relationship between using electronic tablets in school and fourth-grade reading scores.
But you do not have to resort to extensive research to know that this shift to distance learning, albeit necessary, will produce minimal outcomes. Every teacher and isolated student knows in these upcoming months that there is far less learning going on.
Overview of research may be of interest to you.
Sent from my iPhone
Did you mean to attach a link, Mr. Hursh?
Perhaps we should use this time to tell students to learn about something they have always wanted to learn about but never had the time. Some students I know are now saying they are reading books they’ve always wanted to read. If they have internet access, they could easily use that to help them learn something new. If they don’t have internet, maybe they could keep a journal or use the time to start an exercise or meditation routine or perhaps help their parent or relative in his/her job somehow. I worked for most of my childhood in my mom’s law office. How about volunteering at an animal shelter or babysitting for a neighbor? All of this life experience could be their “project” and they could report about it when school returns. School is just one place to learn. You can learn something new in any condition you find yourself.
If anything, I think this pandemic will reveal the inadequacies of online instruction. Online programs are tedious and isolating. The best learning is social. Class discussions and interactions lead to better learning, particularly when students are learning social sciences, humanities and the arts where discussion leads to higher order thinking. Guided by a skilled teacher, students often learn from each other.
Computers are useful tools, They can expose students to many things outside the classroom, and their word processing capabilities are a game changer. For learning computers have their limitations. Online programs present and reinforce rote skills, but learning is about much more than behaviorism.
Its nothing more than a hunch, but I suspect that word processing has made writing worse..
Lord knows that many spell and grammar checks are just idiotic and force anyone who actually knows spelling and grammar to engage in constant battle with an invisible opponent who knows nothing about spelling and grammar.
Sometimes you can turn them off, but not always
Interesting comment. I was probably the only student in my high school class (I graduated in 1986.) to have a word processor. My mom was a lawyer and word processors were just coming out. She loved the emerging tech stuff, taught herself all about it, and used it in her law office. She was on the cutting edge! Anyway, it changed my writing in that I could just put down all my ideas and then change them around by cutting and pasting. I don’t even think at that point they could spell and grammar check. So, that kind of helped me to have more freedom in my writing knowing that I could move sentences and paragraphs easily. I would print out my papers so I could have a visual and then literally cut up the papers to better organize my writing. Before using the word processor, I would try to be completely organized and write a perfect paper from the beginning. My mother suggested just getting all my ideas down on paper and then working from there. It revolutionized my writing! However, I still used dictionaries and grammar BOOKS to help me write.
Perhaps. When computers first arrived, I still wrote my first draft on a yellow pad for several years, then I typed it. In college I had to write papers on a typewriter. I remember the angst when I messed up the footnote and had to do the whole page over.
“I would print out my papers so I could have a visual and then literally cut up the papers to better organize my writing.”
You could do the same thing without a word processor.
One of the things that writing on paper enforces is thinking before you write.
In think word processors make things too easy. They certainly make plagiarism easy.
Then again, I have never written for a living and don’t write long times that would require considerable effort to rewrite on paper.
Word processing undoubtedly makes writing easier. I’m just not convinced it makes it better.
True. I actually did write on paper and then transfer much of that to a word processor. It doesn’t have to be one way or the other. I used many strategies to help me write better. When I look at the student papers that my husband (a high school English teacher) brings home, I am just astounded at how unreadable they are. Students have trouble simply writing a sentence that makes sense. Often there is no organization whatsoever, improper punctuation, misspelling, and work is plagiarized. And these are 10th and 11th graders! I have no idea how writing is being taught in the lower grades but something isn’t working!!!!
Did not like to write at all before word processing. I find that it makes writing easier. At least the programs don’t tell me that my writing is one long run on sentence.
key word for so much of what BigTech offers to kids as online ‘learning’ — TEDIOUS. It so quickly kills interest and creative thought.
This post is a breath of FRESH AIR.
Agree with John Schrock, Mamie Krupczak Allegretti, and retired teacher 200%.
The online component that publishing companies tacked onto textbooks was actually designed to ensure that students didn’t buy a much cheaper used textbook or simply go without.
Because many professors require the online part (which often includes problem sets for science and engineering, for example) and because an access code is required, students MUST pay for the access code (which often costs almost as much as the new textbook, which includes the code).
In other words, far from simply being a added cost on new textbooks, it’s actually a scheme to ensure that the textbook publishes get money whether students buy their texts or not.
Public schools have been criticized relentlessly by no-nothing outsiders. From schedules to curricula to methodologies to cost per pupil $. They claimed to have the solutions, the fixes, the silver bullets, No human service as expansive as the US public school system (50+ million children/adolescents; 3 million teachers; 100,000 schools) could possibly be perfect in the eyes of every stakeholder. This crisis is revealing that despite its challenges and imperfections, the public schools work! No other solution, especially distance learning, will work as well – at scale. The public schools have met many challengers, bust still remains standing as the best working option available.
The biggest problem in public education is that is has a target on its back from the wealthy individuals that seek to privatize it. If we can free public education from outside influences, teachers can get back to real teaching and learning.
When are we going to learn that education is a social process, one in which we learn how to learn and how to learn and work with others. This is crippled by using “remote” technologies because of all of the nonverbal communication, which is the bulk of human to human communication, is stripped away (emoji, emoji, hashtag … gahhh!).
To get a real education, human to human interaction is required, not optional.
PS I am a former chemistry professor, not one of the touchy-feely crowd,
Like!
Love all these comments and the article is a breath of fresh air. Thank you!
As a matter of curiosity, I looked over the online learning platform from the infamous SuccessAcademy in NYC. The Eva is trying her best to enlist parents as if at least one is a full time teacher. I cannot imagine how any adult in a household with more than one child can manage the grade level and time for various subjects that she has offered as a schedule.
https://www.the74million.org/article/success-academy-goes-virtual-new-york-citys-largest-charter-network-shares-how-its-restructuring-to-provide-online-learning/?
Last night I did some distance learning. I reread Plato’s Phaedrus and learned, over a distance of 2,390 years, and chuckled over what Socrates’s lingering religious superstitions. Even this guy, I thought, couldn’t quite shake them, and there are really good reasons for that, because they are so HUMAN, these religious explanations of things. George Santayana wrote in Reason in Religion that it is very easy, child’s play really, to point out the scientific absurdities of most religious beliefs but very much more difficult to understand why they have been, for so long, in so many places, so compelling.
Suppose that you want to learn about, say, how to make puff pastry. It’s a subtle business, making this. But you can get the main stuff–the ingredients, the proportions, the steps in the process–flattening the dough, adding butter, refrigerating, repeating that process–from a person, from a book, from an online video. And the fact that you can do that by any of those means leads some people, especially ones who don’t play well with others and don’t particularly enjoy human interaction, to think that all these methods are equivalent.
For example, a couple DECADES ago, I read a talk by Bill Gates in which he said that the two biggest costs in schools were a) facilities and b) teachers’ salaries, and both were unnecessary because they could be replaced by computers. He’s had this notion for a long, long time. And that’s doubtless why he invested in the Common [sic] Core [sic]–so that there would be a single national bullet list to key online learning to.
And this made sense to him, a guy on the spectrum who spent his youth off by himself, or with a buddy, fiddling with early personal computers when others were going to prom, a guy who started his own company and ruled it like an autocrat, a guy who doesn’t really grok this human interaction thing.
So, after all the TED talks and hype, colleges went all in for distance learning. But they rapidly found that completion rates were abysmal and that the amount of learning was, too.
It turns out that to get, really, making puff pastry, it’s extraordinarily useful to work alongside a teacher, who can show you how the dough is supposed to feel, so you can get the consistency right, and how exactly he or she does the folding. It’s more subtle than just some facts. There’s stuff like tactile and muscle memory involved.
And, people are motivated by other people, by their enthusiasm, by personal interactions, praise, cajoling, and so on.
Teaching has always been a matter of personal interaction–older people who know stuff sharing what they know with younger ones, younger ones responding to those personal interactions. Oh my Lord! Listen to him play that! I want what he has!!! I want to be able to do that! Show me how to do that!
Those interactions are motivating.
And so, despite all the hype, this distance learning stuff fails and fails and fails.
But that doesn’t matter to the Bill Gates’s of the world. It’s all about efficiency. Sure, this distance learning stuff isn’t ideal, BUT IT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR PROLE CHILDREN. And it has the advantage of teaching them not to overcome their ALIENATION FROM TASKS–teaching them to do, gritfully, whatever boring, inane, stupid thing their SUPERIORS tell them to do.
Distance learning is “good enough training for prole children.”
Eventually, everyone will be hooked directly into the www via a chip implanted in their brain.
Who kneeds dough?
Who kneeds dough
When chips will do?
Who needs teacher?
Who needs YOU?
Who kneads dough
Virtual Reality
The sense of feel
And others too
Was never real
But neural stew
The world “out there”
Is in our head
So best beware
That “real” is dead
Leibniz was waaay ahead of his time
“Leibniz’s universe contains only God and non-composite, immaterial, soul-like entities called “monads.” Strictly speaking, space, time, causation, material objects, among other things, are all illusions ”
https://www.iep.utm.edu/leib-met/
Who needs Leibniz?
Had Leibniz lived
Three hundred years
He would have proved
Our biggest fears
That “real” is naught
But in our head
No matter what
Our mother said
Oh my lord, SomeDAM. I LOVE THOSE POEMS!!!!
Of course, people often don’t really understand this argument about reality being in the head. It goes back to Kant. It’s not that there is NO reality out there. It’s that we can only perceive it as we perceive it, through our cognitive and perceptual mechanisms, which create an interface for us that the philosophically naive take as “the real.” But it’s not–we don’t perceive the world as it is in and of itself, what Kant called the noumenon, just as, when we perceive a file folder on our desktop, that doesn’t mean that there is a file folder inside the computer. In fact, the desktop, the interface, and the underlying reality are VASTLY different. So, what is being asserted is NOT that the external world is unreal. What is being asserted is that we don’t know it. We only know the phenomenal world–the world as we can conceive and perceive it. And based on that, we make conjectures about the “real world,” as we might make conjectures about an object inside a locked box by shaking the box, smelling it, weighing it, and so on.
So, Leibniz, as everyone knows, was the co-inventor of Calculus. He also wrote a big book on Theodicy (and coined the term), the question of why, in a universe created and run by a good God, there exists evil–broken iPhone screens, Microsoft software, Trump’s brain, coronavirus. His answer: we live in the “best of all possible worlds.” This was the idea that Voltaire made fun of in Candide. But oddly, Leibniz the Calculus guy missed what I think is the best argument for reconciling these notions of a good, all-powerful God, on the one hand, and evil, on the other. So here, my contribution to Theodicy: If we are eternal souls, then we have an infinite amount of time. Any amount of finite evil we undergo in this life, divided by infinity, is zero.
That’s going to be of little consolation to someone dying of coronavirus, I imagine.
Quantum mechanics has changed the way people look at this stuff somewhat.
Many physicists — perhaps most — believe that there actually is no “real” objective world, only one of potentialities.
But Einstein clung to the view that there was an independent objective external reality. He summed up his view with the question “does the moon exist only when you look at it?”
Click to access mermin_moon.pdf
Personally, I don’t have an opinion either way, but I do think that if it ever comes to implanted chips in our brains, it won’t matter what is “really” the cases because from an individual standpoint “reality” is what we perceive.
True. Reality is what we perceive.
Then I plan to create my own reality by programming my perceptions to believe anything I want. It will be my private, fantasy world, anything I want it to be.
Boy, am I going to have a lot of fun as I take off in my starship and warp across the universe and what a starship it will be. The size of a small moon with a population of my own selection.
As we fly away toward the stars, we will all be waving goodbye to Trump and his kind, forever.
“There’s stuff like tactile and muscle memory involved.”
Way back when when I taught a couple of gals how to do upholstery I’d tell them they had to learn to “see with their hands” (Catfish noodlers are famous for knowing that fact), in other words feel what is under the fabric to make sure the stuffing is smooth because if the stuffing is not even, smooth the final fabric will not be smooth and even.
Same with my woodworking, Duane! You plane, you scrape, you feel it with your hands, you scrape some more.
The puff pastry, upholstery, and woodworking examples work powerfully. So complex, yet so simple. And the puff pastry poems were puff-tasty.
they were indeed!!!
Oy vey, i shifted tenses.
After being a public school teacher for thirty years (1975 – 2005), I think I can say with reasonable certainty that getting most of your students to do the work at home that helps them learn what the teacher is teaching is not easy even when you have them in your classroom and are face-to-face with them.
To clarify, for 27 of the 30 years, I taught in schools in the same district with very high rates of child poverty at 70 percent or higher. These schools were also in a community with multigenerational, violent street gangs.
For three years I taught on the other side of the freeway and railroad in the same district with most of my students coming from middle and upper-middle-class homes. And, even with those students getting them all to cooperate, do the classwork and homework was a challenge.
What is the average high school graduation rate of online schools? That number says it all.
From 2016: “Low-Graduation-Rate Schools Concentrated in Charter, Virtual School Sectors”
http://neatoday.org/2016/05/16/low-graduation-rate-charter-virtual-schools/
Unless a teacher’s students are all AP or Honors kids, they are going to have a frustrating time getting all of their students to do enough of the online work to learn something.
John, yes,research and personal observation tells us that distance learning can never take the place of the live human interaction. It is just qualitatively better than with technology. All learning must be contextualized. It is through interacting that new concepts are formed and the imagination is stimulated. We learn from one another. Everything the student studies should be related to the students in some way – connecting background knowledge.
Goodlad maintains that we should utilize many activities to develop basic concepts, not just by reading and writing, but by dancing, drawing, constructing, touching, thinking talking, shaping and planning. Dramatizing is very important even with older student: Process Drama is used. https://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/educators/how-to/from-theory-to-practice/process-drama.aspx
John Dewey was emphatic about interaction for learning; learning can’t be on an abstract, passive mode. Learning is social. We don’t see with your eyes, or hear with your ears. We perceive with your whole being which is based upon our experiences.
Piaget maintained concrete experiences are needed for learning to occur.
Vygotsky maintained that conversation is our connection to comprehension. He maintained that when no conversation takes place I class about the student’s thinking and learning, learning is not taking place. Class instruction with skill and drill is rote learning.
Yes, we do have on-line learning with interaction on the college level but that can’t substitute for physical presence. Just like looking at a painting of a beautiful scene can’t be the same as being there.
I really appreciate this post. Tech business and its billionaire CEO vulture-venture philanthrocapitalists have been pushing us to put our classes online for too long for this to be just a coronavirus thing. Why do they think, now that administrators can temporarily force us to do it, that more people instead of fewer will all of a sudden find online classes superior? Do they actually think the disaster capitalism product they’re selling works? Nonsense.
The coronavirus shutdown is not a fun adventure.
The coronavirus shutdown is not a an exciting chance to learn new quote-unquote 21st century skills.
The coronavirus shutdown is nothing other than a tragedy, and this too shall pass.
We’re doing it because it needs to be done. When the coronavirus shutdown is over, so will be online teaching. Over the course of the next seven days, I am to required to enroll in and endure nine and a half hours of online classes about teaching online. A few of those hours are about actual online teaching nuts and bolts, but the rest of the course offerings have to do with so-called blended learning models. Blended learning models are for brick and mortar classrooms, not for the coronavirus shutdown. (See, they’re using the disaster to wedge their products into our future.) In the models, students spend about one third of the time interacting with a teacher. I refused pressure to “blend” online work into my teaching eight years ago, and seven years ago, and six… I can’t wait to get back into my classroom and throw all this digital learning junk into the digital trash where it belongs. Thank you for this post.