New Generation Instructional Information Technology and the Management of Teaching and Learning

D.S.G. Carter

Faculty of Education, Curtin University of Technology

Western Australia

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Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference

(September 11-14 1997: University of York)

Abstract

The recent experience of curriculum change suggest that information overload is a health hazard, and, rather than supporting change efforts, it has become a bottleneck tending to inhibit school improvement and curriculum reform. Information management for decision support is crucial to innovation and implementation success. A new generation of instructional information management systems (IIMSs) are now becoming available at affordable prices. These tools, which are professionally driven rather than for the purpose of scientific management, seek to integrate the school community with the web of relationships between curriculum, teaching, assessment and school organisation. In this demonstration and presentation an example of an Instructional Information Management System (IIMS) will be rendered transparent, and implications for collaborative information-based work cultures considered.

Over the course of the last decade it has become evident that systemic educational reform, at all levels of the education system, has become a cross-national preoccupation. Central to the reforms is a concern to raise educational standards developed variously by state education agencies, universities and colleges, professional associations and registration bodies, the corporate sector and government agencies, with input from a range of stakeholder groups. Recent experience with large scale planned change, however, has illustrated the swamping effects of extensive information provision which overwhelms those undergoing the processes of change, and those who are charged with managing its implementation. This has, in effect, tended to work against the implementation of planned change, rather than promoting it ( Hall and Carter 1995).

In the flurry of activity associated with effecting educational improvement and change, the latent power of new technology for information processing does not appear to have been fully exploited in order to manage curricular operations and change processes in an integrative, systemic and comprehensive fashion. The reasons for this are complex and go beyond the scope of this paper. In this turbulent educational environment, increasing pressures for accountability have resulted in the proliferation of a multitude of standards to help specify what it is that educational institutions should be accomplishing via publicly funded instructional programs.

One of the consequences of these externally generated pressures for more precision in student monitoring and reporting against socially desirable outcomes, is to present educators with a dilemma as to how they might meet the individual needs of students, while maintaining consistency of quality against a set of standards. Accountability, in the sense of being able to define precisely and show relationships between system variables and student learning, proves to be an important but elusive task without recourse to information management technology to meet the increased societal expectations of schools colleges and universities measured in terms of 'value for money' for the educational resources expended. To this end new information technology has an increasing role to play in managing information for decision support from the classroom to the boardroom.

Computer Managed Teaching/Learning Systems

Several Computer Managed Learning (CML) products are commercially available to teachers and trainers under the general label of ‘instructional management systems’. It is obvious that all have different features, however, and, depending on how one defines instruction, some of these systems may not be true instructional management systems. For example, a management system which works to identify learning deficits in students by managing objective and test question item banks; test generation and scoring facilities, and student analysis and reporting may be more appropriately termed an ‘assessment management system’. Some assessment management systems include the capability of managing instructional resources along with objectives, and can be used to guide the selection of instructional resources where additional teaching is considered to be necessary.

Good assessment management systems are useful at pointing out ‘weak’ areas of an instructional program by comparing students’ performance against objectives. Generally originating in the 1960’s mainframe environments, these systems are traditionally termed ‘computer managed instruction’ or CMI systems. They are not particularly good at helping educators identify causes of problems and analysing relationships between curriculum, instruction and assessment.

Instructional Information Management Systems (IIMSs) broaden the concept of assessment management by providing information management ‘upstream’ of the assessment process. Ideally, IIMSs (by definition) should be able to manage critical information at every step of the complete curriculum and instructional design process (ie designing, developing, delivering, assessing, and evaluating instruction). Student assessment in a well designed IIMS is only one aspect of a much broader information system which manages information that is required as other instructional decisions are made ( Bloch, Hedburg and Harper, 1994).

According to total quality management practices, we cannot continue to rely on the method of detection of defects if we want to learn how to improve quality. A good IIMS, then, needs to assist educators in the management and analysis of all aspects of the curriculum cycle in which candidates for assessment and analysis include intentions (outcomes and curriculum) and process (teaching and learning) as well as product (learner performance - students’, teachers’ and supervisors’).

Well constructed Instructional Information Management Systems (IIMSs), employing relational data base technology, are designed specifically to allow for the unobtrusive and automatic acquisition of data describing the core operations of education and training institutions (Burger; 1995). They can be used to formalise and capture the interlocking cycle of relationships between curriculum, instruction and assessment within a given context. They underpin and support information-based practice for managing student centred learning. By acquiring skills in the use of IIMSs, integrating data on curriculum, state and national guidelines, professional needs and competencies, student demographics and performance, practitioners can begin to identify and understand those relationships and patterns that contribute to overall system and institutional improvement in which student learning is paramount (Carter and Burger; 1994).

The curriculum as lived out in the every day experiences of students is multifaceted and changing. Thus, two-dimensional models appearing in a range of curriculum documents do not, and cannot, adequately represent the dynamic nature of learning context, curriculum processes and associated knowledge structures. To be responsive to these, the curriculum of each institution has to be locally crafted in order to capitalise on local talents, with local insights in order to specific student needs. Sophisticated IIMSs enable instructional leaders to determine the curriculum scope and sequence they desire, while enabling each of their teaching staff to be actively engaged in curriculum development activities in an on-going way.

Information management and professional accountability

It is recognised, generally speaking, that second order changes which have occurred behind the classroom door, reflecting advances in new information technology, have at best been piecemeal where change has occurred at all (Fullan, 1992; p. 10). The reasons for this are complex and go well beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, at the junction of teaching with learning, the introduction of the microcomputer together with advances in communications technology, provides us with the latent capacity to transform both including the organisational structures in which teaching and learning are embedded.

Ideally, IIMSs (by definition) should be able to manage critical information at every step of the complete curriculum and instructional design process (ie. designing, developing, delivering, assessing and evaluating instruction). Student assessment in a good IIMS is only one aspect of a much broader information system which manages information that is required as a range of decisions about teaching and learning and associated processes are made. Sophisticated IIMSs which combine those functions that lie at the heart of any educational institution, such as curriculum development, instruction, evaluation and assessment, allow for the formation of information rich environments with great transformative potential. In short the computer, when interacting with a professionally informed mind, acts as a magnifier of human capacities that enables us to perceive yet further possibilities previously beyond our comprehension.

Informating educational environments

There are two ways of using technology to achieve information rich environments. One is for the purpose of automating: the other for informating. While there are some who clearly seek to use technology for the former purpose, it tends to become mechanistic and to isolate the human element from the process itself. Automating then is not a satisfactory means for supporting teachers and administrators and for educational problem solving. To informate[1], however, is to empower educators as professionals. It is in this context that instructional leaders can work with staff and students in order to resolve the question of what information has to be readily available and easily accessible for them to understand the nature of certain educational processes and to execute instructional and curricular events.

In the information rich environments created by the use of an IIMS, where information can be shared ecologically within and across the academic community, explicit connections between internal and external environments and their various components becomes a practical reality. When configured and used in this way information management technology can provide, for example, the means for:

  • ascertaining which curriculum elements are included in daily instructional plans,
  • monitoring student grouping practices;
  • tracking students student performance and recreating instructional histories;
  • facilitating the development of teacher made learning materials;
  • enabling the management of material resources;
  • differentiating the form of assessment programs across different time spans and subject areas, and,
  • effecting curriculum alignment to external references, benchmarks and standards on a continuous, routine and substantially unobtrusive basis (Carter, 1993).

For outcome evaluations, supervision and accountability purposes, administrators can ascertain the extent to which a particular teacher uses a variety of teaching/learning activities and resources aligned with instructional objectives, or the extent to which curriculum and its implementation matches external guidelines, standards and benchmarks, or other performance indicators. The capabilities of the particular IIMS you will see demonstrated at the presentation are summarised in Appendix 1. It’s curricular structure is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: IMSeries Curriculum Structure for Outcomes Based Education

Curriculum and Outcomes Hierarchy

CurriculumCross References

Because the IIMS automatically records detailed audit trails as teachers and administrators use it, it become possible to obtain profiles of how the performances of students are changing, by viewing sets of records accumulated unobtrusively through the daily operations of the institution over selected periods of time.

Instructional process

Generally speaking, there is little argument among professionals that helping people realise their full potential as learners is an ultimate aim of education. How well this is realised in the context of institutional and national goals depends on how well teaching staff are motivated to work for constant improvement, and are themselves provided with the resources and incentives to grow and develop as learners concerning their own professional practice. In this regard Sarason (1990) makes an observation that if teachers, as learners, do not perceive that the appropriate conditions for their own growth obtain, they cannot create and sustain them for students. From this point of view, student learning is also a function of teacher learning, continuing development and growth.

For learning to be made effective it has to be closely integrated across different subject matter areas. For this to occur a 'whole curriculum' perspective concerning the vertical sequences of learning activities and their integration across content areas at different year levels is required. Further, the monitoring of student progression against standards has to take place across different subject matter, in different learning contexts and employing different instructional processes. In so doing, a more flexible approach to the use of time and student centred course implementation modes is implied as individuals progress at different rates.

Monitoring and reporting validly on student learning and progress is a most difficult thing to accomplish and to demonstrate in practice. To do this effectively, and with insight, teachers must be able to capitalise on new knowledge, make data-based professional judgements, and acquire intimate knowledge of the changing needs of the learner in the exercise of their own creativity and spontaneity. We now have the on-line information management systems available to resolve at least some of the problems of curriculum integration; of directing learning sequences, and monitoring and reporting their effects on learning and achievement from students' initial entry to the institution until their final graduation and/or departure.

While a well designed curriculum, aligned to appropriate instructional processes, is regarded as fundamental to helping each student achieve mastery of the objectives, and is easily accomplished in principle using the new IIMS technology, slavish adherence to the textbook and detailed attention to every objective in the curriculum is not a means to achieving the desired learning. In effect, the latter is likely to work against the intended result of fully realising student learning potential.

For the instructional context and learning environment to be regarded as potentially rich, a process orientation is necessary in which a variety of teaching and learning strategies are present, with students afforded the opportunity to read and discuss much more widely than is directly required for the immediate achievement of short term objectives. It is also important to realise that it is not necessary - and even ill advised - to seek to control all the activities that take place under instructional processes. What is important is to be able to ascertain their nature at will, and to direct them differentially to learners as needed, and in the full knowledge of the extent to which external agencies are also influencing and guiding instructional processes.

Assessment of student performance

With a renewed focus on student learning outcomes, and the trend towards competency-based curriculum frameworks requiring the close monitoring of student progress towards the achievement of certain standards; also to provide feedback for further instruction, or for counselling and reporting, timely information is required by decision makers. This includes not only what level of mastery was achieved by a student on a particular occasion, but also the conditions under which the performance occurred. For decision-support systems to be able to inform and guide practice, it is necessary to retrieve a comprehensive range of data for any student at will, and to relate them to other relevant factors such as when certain objectives were taught to different groups of students, with what resources and activities and to what effect. To inform decisions, data also needs to be related to student characteristics, aspirations and needs in order to make judgements when counselling, making inferences about student mastery, and reporting accurately and meaningfully to significant others and ‘the system’. The focusing of relational data on a particular student performance, at a specific point in a given assessment period, can be represented as a performance point which is illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The Concept of a Performance Point

In the aggregate, each performance point becomes a data point for the contextualised construction of a performance profile of student achievement against any criterion, objective(s), activity, resource or benchmark, need or external reference managed by and accessed via the IIMS. The pattern of performance points shown in Figure 2 allows the instructor to recover information-rich patterns in student achievement ‘captured’ by the IIMS unobtrusively during the day-to-day processes of curriculum and instruction. Educators can contemplate them and arrive at decisions with, and on behalf of, the student, leading in turn to more accurate diagnoses of learner needs. In effect this provides the basis for individualised attention and thus enhances individual student progression towards the achievement of desired objectives and outcomes.

It should be remembered that the functions of those types of assessment that are learner centred and those which are essentially for the purposes of accountability, credentialing and reporting, need to be held separate. Both aspects of assessment imply different sets of relationships between the teacher and learners and learners with each other. Once assessment data can be readily retrieved and contextually related to the instructional conditions under which it occurred, it can be used to contemplate and monitor student performance in a form accessible to students and their mentors. Further, these data become immediately accessible as feedback for the further design and implementation of curriculum and associated processes in an on-going and cyclical manner.

While there is a place for examinations and testing, in the context of student centred and self-directed learning, an accurate and useful set of performance points for the enhancement of instruction and learning is more likely to be achieved by reducing the emphasis on a few highly precise measurements, and moving towards continuous assessment by increasing the value of many varied and less precise measurements. The latter might be realised through the use of student portfolio assessment, for example. To demonstrate increased teaching/learning effectiveness, student progress needs to be interpreted via professional judgements, together with a range of student work samples, and referenced to a range of formal and informal assessments gathered over time. It is difficult to imagine how this might be given practical effect in the absence of new generation information management technology.

Conclusion

As advances in information technology lead us towards more interactive, resource-based learning environments, the role of the teacher or lecturer necessarily changes from that of instructor, in the traditional sense, to become a manager of student learning. In the social dimension of schools, colleges and universities, a parallel shift in emphasis is needed in order to supplant the instructional dominance of transmission models of teaching with constructivist approaches to student centred and student directed learning. To this end, the use of professionally driven Instructional Information Management Systems(IIMSs), in contrast to Management Information Systems (MISs) (based on scientific management principles for the purpose of efficient administration), enable the advocated shift in emphasis to become a practical reality.