Perspective

The Concord Consortium Vision

By Robert Tinker

The mission of the Concord Consortium is to foster equity and self-realization through improved education. The greatest and most underexploited opportunity for advancing this mission is through educational technologies. We know that students at all ages are capable of learning more, earlier, and at a far deeper level than is currently achieved and we have seen this kind of learning in well-designed schools that have creative teachers and use excellent, computer-based materials. Our goal is to make this the norm.

The Concord Consortium focuses on the challenges created by STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) because it is so critical to society and many schools are baffled about how to improve it.

The single most valuable and underused strategy in STEM education is student inquiry-based learning. Every educational standards effort and a large body of research all support the central role of inquiry in improving STEM education. In spite of this overwhelming support for inquiry, it is seldom used in STEM teaching, which continues to be dominated by text and lecture.

The central finding of 25 years of research on educational technology is that students can learn important concepts earlier and more deeply through guided inquiry using computer-based models and tools. The impact of these uses of information technologies can even be seen in national tests. The 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress found “Eighth-graders whose teachers had students use computers for simulations and models or for data analysis scored higher, on average, than eighth-graders whose teachers did not.” Similar results were seen in grade 12.

Technology can improve teaching and learning as measured against current educational standards. We do this by using technology to help students learn concepts through exploration while delaying formal and abstract treatments of the material. Core concepts like energy, plate tectonics, and evolution are accessible to young learners who can use these concepts to understand large parts of STEM that previously had to be memorized. In the long run, however, the standards must change, because technology alters what can be taught and the order in which STEM concepts should be introduced. For instance, current standards are based on research that purports to prove that students cannot understand atoms and molecules until high school, but research based on using our interactive models demonstrates that kids as early as grade five can achieve a level of “molecular literacy” that goes far beyond current practice.

It is sometimes asserted that inquiry-based instruction is not appropriate in urban and under-performing schools. A number of research studies have come to the opposite conclusion. It is no surprise that research has demonstrated that well-designed inquiry is just as valuable in an under-resourced urban classroom as anywhere else, even in ELL classrooms. Similarly, it is also often assumed that technology is a barrier and a luxury in urban schools that need to concentrate on basics. Again, research contradicts this. With support, technology can make significant contributions to student learning in urban settings. It has long been recognized that the “digital gap” in education is much less about the availability of technology than about how the technology is being used. High-quality materials supported with professional development are the best way to address these inequities.

A New Medium

The Concord Consortium has a vision for totally new ways of developing, sharing, and supporting STEM learning materials that have inquiry at their core. In collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto, we have pioneered an innovative software architecture called SAIL, the Scalable Architecture for Interactive Learning. SAIL is a revolutionary framework for generating, delivering, and modifying inquiry-based learning activities that have built-in guidance and real-time assessment. We have also developed OTrunk, a software interface standard for applications that simplifies incorporating new functionality into the SAIL framework. Together, these technologies can support a broad range of learning materials that support inquiry.

We are developing materials with these technologies that redefine STEM curriculum, how teaching is done, and what educational research can be undertaken. The materials created using this system will have the following features:

Learning through guided inquiry. The primary learning strategy used in the materials will engage students in investigating real or simulated systems that require and invite student investigation. Proven instructional patterns such as predict-observe-explain (POE) will be used to structure student inquiry.

Support for inquiry tools. Probeware is used extensively to increase the responsiveness, range, and number of lab investigations. For systems that cannot be studied directly, powerful computational models with dynamic graphics are used. Other materials engage students in explorations of online scientific data, such as found in both earthquake and protein databases.

Collaborative development. The materials are fluid and easy to adapt to new developments, resources, and needs. Unlike texts and most software that is cast in stone and handed down to teachers as received wisdom, these materials are in a constant state of flux; using the expertise of a community, the materials are updated continually and improved based on inputs from scientists, teachers, data from student learning, new software from programmers, and new approaches from educational developers.

Free and available online. The materials are available online at no cost for any educational use. This ensures that students, teachers, parents, informal educators, and volunteers can easily access, utilize, and improve the materials.

Teacher feedback. The materials will soon include automatic detection of student actions and responses. When used by individuals or small groups, this provides students, teachers, and researchers with detailed data of where students are in an activity, their path through the material, help requested, time required for each task, and inquiry skills. Teachers will be able to use these data to modify instruction to increase learning.

Universal Design for Learning. The materials will incorporate principles of UDL so that they are effective with the largest possible range of students. This requires providing alternative communication channels, incorporating different kinds of scaffolds, and giving the learner cognitive prompts and tools. One important Concord Consortium innovation in this area is smart tools that can communicate with learners about patterns of data and models.

Our developments in computational models exemplify the kinds of innovations that the SAIL/OTrunk system will enable. BioLogica, the Molecular Workbench, and NetLogo are powerful modeling environments that need the underlying SAIL/OTrunk technology and demonstrate its importance. But educators want solutions to their educational problems, not models, tools, or architectures. The emerging Concord Consortium technology framework facilitates our work in solving current problems using our growing set of tools. As our technologies mature, we are increasingly able to produce materials economically that are innovative, educationally effective, and easily implemented.

We are developing another class of technologies that provide access to student data generated by the technology. Teacher portals will give teachers unprecedented insights into how students are progressing and what problems they may be encountering. The portal will also give teachers controls that can be used to improve learning. Teachers will be able to create collaborative groups, make assignments, probe student understanding, and share student models, data, and reports. Researchers will have portals for fine-grained analysis of student actions and teacher use of the resources. This will permit a new kind of research based on detailed analysis of very large numbers of students.

Robert Tinker (bob@concord.org) is President of the Concord Consortium.