Chapter 1: What’s with Teens, School & Civic Participation Today?
Adolescents’ 21st Century Role in the World
In cyberspace, knowledge can no longer be considered to be something abstract
and transcendental. It is all the more visible— and even tangible in real time— in
that it is communicated by actual people….contrary to all the rhetoric about the
so-called ‘coldness’ of cyberspace, interactive digital networks are instrumental in
bringing knowledge down to the personal plane and making it more tangible.
(Lévy, 1997, p. 254)
Adolescents & civic participation: Changing standards. More and more young people
are being credited as utilizing new media to engage in civic participation and effect change.
“The Occupy movement, stopping SOPA, and the power of six million users of Change.org are
only three of many examples of how new media impact politics in America, especially as politics
are practiced among young people” (Cohen, Kahne, Bowyer, Middaugh, & Rogowski, 2012, p.
v). In surveying 3,000 young people between the ages of 15 and 25, the MacArthur Research
Network on Youth and Participatory Politics documented that just over a third of the American
youth had participated in at least one act of participatory politics in the preceding year.
Researchers had noted only a spread of 7% points at the widest gap charting such acts among
diverse racial groups and a two percent gap at the smallest. Above that, all the groups had 94%
or higher access to online computers, challenging existing assumptions about a standing “digital
divide” (Cohen et al., 2012, p. vii).
American teenagers thereby much more readily utilize online opportunities to structure
their participatory political actions. Social media and Web 2.0 allow young adults to directly
engage worldwide phenomena and trends, to directing their own exploration of the issues, and to
take whatever actions they find meaningful. The result is a problem-based learning experience
more authentic than anything currently offered in most American schooling.
1
2
The ill-structured boundaries of real-world challenges offer adolescents the opportunity
to learn about civic participation by engaging in real action. The Internet offers adolescents
unprecedented access to the world outside school doors. Some argue that connectivity promotes
a “participatory culture […one with] relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic
engagement” (Jenkins et al., 2009, p. 6) that in effect builds community because it creates the
opportunity for sharing and mentoring via social interactions for those with common interests.
Cultural critics argue that schools are “slow to react to the emergence of this new
participatory culture” (Jenkins et al., 2009, p. xiii); and schools fail to support teens in the
development the new media literacies that support development of cultural competencies and
social skills necessary for full involvement. Put simply, the failure of schools to fully integrate
social media and technology into subject-content cuts off the civic participation of youth.
It also prevents adolescents from keeping up with national standards for education in an
increasingly international world. The Common Core State Standards, adopted in recent years by
states across the United States, include requirements that digital media be included in the set of
research and production skills students possess. By not developing adolescents’ full range of
new media literacies, schools are leaving them woefully unprepared to meet these literacy goals.
One must ask, why are schools not more able to increase civic participation and literacy through
new media and access to participatory culture? Just as importantly, one must ask how educators
can support or scaffold students through such a journey?
Adolescents and schooling: Intertia. One of the challenges in faced by public
schooling is an ever-changing understanding of what qualifies as effective civic participation. At
the beginning of the twentieth century, public schooling was viewed as part of the American
crucible— the great melting pot metaphor. School was expected to train new immigrants to
3
access the American workforce and educational system— training them in public schooling quite
literally to toe the line.
Mid-twentieth century, public schooling was asked to inculcate the newly empowered
middle class in civic-minded behavior while freshly focusing American youth on the science,
technology, and math required to take dominance in the Cold War and in the space race. In the
complex years of the late 20th century cultural upheavals and a post-colonial sensibility altered
the status-quo of expectations.
The twenty-first century has brought widespread globalization and neoliberal policies
focused on dominating the new economy. Social media and ubiquitous technology has further
changed the definitions of civic participation. Young adults have made international history on
multiple occasions through their YouTube viral videos, their Facebook, their tweets, and their
documentary journalism shared through viral campaigns.
As a result, public schools today face complex inputs— demands for programmatic and
fiscal accountability, public concerns of governmental spending and property taxes, commerce
dictated by the billion-dollar testing industry, and competition from a new wave of publically
funded charter programs.
Despite being less accessible to the masses, the nineteenth century schooling system
espoused an ideal that it could transform any participant into an intellectual ready for the
academy. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are accused by some of taking the position of
sorting young people into careers and intellectual categories that determine their trajectory. The
growth from one-room schoolhouses and rural school settings to large urban school districts
filled with a diverse population of new immigrants engaged a battle around academic design and
governance. At the turn of the twentieth century, public education in major United States cities
4
like New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, was embattled with municipal government leaders,
wealthy intellectuals, social reformers, journalists, and those studying educational administration
debating how schools should best be run (Tyack, 1974).
Called into question was whether a school system could succeed by actually offering all
children a road to academic success, or whether schooling was to have a very structured role in
the path to one’s future as a worker. The battles over the political governance in these school
systems was heavily affected by two forces-- there were successful “leaders of the intellectual
life of the city…[who] assumed that what was good for their class and private institutions was
good public policy as well” (Tyack, 1974, p. 130) and there were an emerging set of university
academics who were quickly pressed by government and activist alike to step into the role of
administrative experts who could define a cohesive approach to understanding educational
administration.
Between 1901 and 1930, educational administration figures emerged, defined, and
defended an increasingly public administered system of education— from David Snedden and
Samuel Dutton to Ellwod Cubberly and George Strayer (Tyack, 1974), these influential
administrators pushed the public education system toward a more methodological approach. The
result of this business and scientific approach that moved toward more universal and compulsory
high school commencement and increased size, scope, and professional training for educators;
the same changes also differentiated, sorted, and tracked students’ participation in the learning
on the basis of “scientific tests” (Tyack, 1974, p. 182) and “detailed records on students from
IQ’s to physical history and vocational and recreational interests” (p. 183).
Public education in the first half of the twentieth century was redefined by the
administrative progressives who denied the popular nineteenth-century vision of public
5
education to shape academic success for all; instead they responded to increased ethno-cultural
and socio-economic diversity through developing additional offerings to which they restricted
students to produce workers who could meet pragmatic employer needs (Tyack, 1974).
This period of the administrative progressives defined the tracked classrooms and
standardized testing paradigm that still dominates. Although multiple iterations of standards
have been proposed and revised from state and national level movements over the decades, very
little has changed in the actual format of schooling. Testing remains the raison d’être, even in
American cities that have embraced group work, accountable talk, and project-based activities.
During the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the Common Core State Standards
(CCSS) grew out of higher education’s response to a secondary educational system that was built
around standardized testing that surveyed surface understanding. The complaints of college
professors, especially in math and science, were that students possessed much surface knowledge
about non-vital subjects but failed to demonstrate critical thinking skills grounded in discipline-
specific knowledge. These standards have sought to define a wider range of literacy and
numeracy grounded in applied knowledge, performance assessment, and integrated technologies.
The adoption of these standards across the United States has engaged states to define a wider
berth of skills and expectations when talking about ensuring that a student is literate and able to
read, write, and speak at graduation level benchmarks.
Developing New Media Literacies
Public schools and technology: New media literacies. For a generation raised on web-
search tools, smart phones, and social media, education is no longer taking place solely in
textbooks. However, there have been widely variable experies when teachers attempt to
integrate technology into public school classrooms. Pew Institute’s 2012 research with a non-
6
probability sample of 2,462 educators associated with the National Writing Project and the
College Board’s Advanced Placement program voiced some of the technology concerns that still
plague educators.
Over 90 % of those surveyed credited the Internet as having a major impact on their own
content gathering and over seventy percent praised its impact in facilitating communication
among parents, teachers, and students. These teachers also spoke to qualitative conflicts in the
integration of technology. Teachers working with low-income populations reflected in much
greater numbers concerns about the negative impacts of school policies, planning, and resources
on their students; while 60 to 83 percent of the teachers questioned aspects of Google,
Wikipedia, and other online tools on which they relied on heavily but found limiting (Purcell,
Heaps, Buchanan, & Friedrich, 2013).
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) speak to digital media and technology by
suggesting that college and career ready students can: enhance English language arts skills
through thoughtful, strategic, and capable technology usage; perform targeted informational
research; evaluate tools, mediums, and data to their communication goals; and synthesize online
and offline knowledge (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA],
Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], 2010). As an anchor document that focuses
attention on performance goals, it does not pave a road toward classroom implementation. The
CCSS anchor document directs educators toward its implementation arguing that it must be
“complemented by well developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid
out in this document” (NGA, CCSSO, 2010, p. 6).
If contemporary standards direct educators to integrate technology and media literacy
into secondary classrooms, then why does such a disconnection exist between these expectations
7
and implementations in the classroom? In 2001, Barbara Means contrasted the growing
availability of technology in the classroom with the failure of supports, resulting in students and
teachers not using technology properly and selecting tasks that don’t really match up to the
strengths of the technology (Means, 2001).
Means stages technology’s entry into the classroom into eras—defining the 1980s as a
time of “content through computers” (Means, 2001, p. 58) skill and drill software. She portrayed
the late 1980s and 1990s as being driven by the replacement of content specific software with
“general-purpose technology tools, such as word processors and spreadsheets” (p.58) and
illustrated through slogans and powerful statistics about the success of e-rate, the ways in which
the late 1990s and early 2000s became dominated by goals of connectivity, search engines, and
web-based tools in the schools (Means, 2001). It seems that the growth of access to processing
power and connectivity has in fact driven educational technology towards information gathering
and away from subject-specific goals.
Nothing better exemplifies this late 1990s and early 2000s trend than the five-component
tightly structured WebQuests developed and shared out from San Diego State University by
Bernie Dodge and Tom March. Dodge suggests that the model serves as particularly powerful
for social studies investigations by shifting attention from web searching to web resource or
informational usage (Molebash & Dodge, 2003).
Dodge markets the approach as inquiry-based, offering models of project-based activities
that range from 1-3 periods to 1-4 weeks, advocating that the end-product constitutes a
performance assessment. He holds up WebQuests for their ability to “provide a significant
amount of scaffolding to students” (p. 160) based on the intense degree of predetermination of
resources and outcomes generated by the teacher. One can imagine why the model gained
8
traction in numerous K-12 and higher educational settings during the late 1990s and 2000s.
According to some estimates, the growth of WebQuests between 1997 and 2007 was so great,
that a Google search by name yields over one million websites that refer to the topic (Maddux &
Cummings, 2007).
Community college librarian Deborah Spanfelner (2000) extols the benefits that
WebQuests lent to her collaboration with an English professor for a United States Literature
class. She describes a three-stage WebQuest that engaged students to expand on literature they
had read by first being guided to specific sites to research the author of their piece, then being
directed to become a fictional voice for a character in the book based on their research during a
face-to-face library visit, followed by utilizing an electronic library database to gather literary
criticism on their piece. Spanfelner (2000) wrote an article for a community college library
publication describing the excitement of visiting students and her own fulfillment in technology
infused library activities. The article lacked formal or structured research on the process and any
quantitative information, even on demographics. The other glaring problem that the article fails
to recognize is that the experience that was crafted was simply an electronic version of
traditional book and library research process. Students did not gain any deep experience of the
web— they did not even get the level of experience they might have received sitting at an online
research terminal in a library. They were simply guided into a high-tech journey into the world
of books (Spanfelner, 2000).
Barbra Means offers a vision of how classroom activities can turn towards authenticity in
her turn of century predictions about the future of educational technology, having predicted a
shift from informational hunting and gathering to online collaborations and use of mobile
devices by students gathering information. She highlights the existence of early practice-
9
oriented online ventures like the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment
(GLOBE), the Hands-On Universe, and the Knowledge Forum, offering students and teachers
alike the ability to share data, participate in learning communities external to the school, and
even share content amongst classes (Means, 2001). Her reflections showcase the need for
changes in classroom concepts of the interaction among technology, pedagogy, and content
knowledge.
In the decade or so since Means’ predictions, classrooms have still lagged behind while
the landscape of Web 2.0 and social media provided a fertile ground for commercial and
academic writing and cultural analysis?
In analyzing trends of social media dominating the writing establishment in the 21st
century, Jonathan Alter (2012) noted in his Wall Street Journal article that the online platform
Wattpad had seen begun to pass notable benchmarks including a rise in total postings past the
500,000 mark, an overall 144% increase in posting, and almost 2,000,000 site visits to a specific
post inspired by the Hunger Games series. In the same article, Alter (2010) credits fanfiction.net
for its passing of the 500,000 posting mark and for the bragging rights as the platform which
emerged future Random House 50 Shades of Grey author E.L. James via a self-publishing a
Twilight-inspired fan fiction piece (Alter, 2012). Online fandom sites have become a new launch
pad for aspiring writers to develop their skills, establish a following, and practice toward
commercial success (Alter, 2012). These sites have become the location for many to practice the
same English language arts skills with which educators are struggling to engage students.
Additionally, the ease of Web 2.0 tools like Livejournal, Wikia, and Blogspot have
enabled passionate fans to create flourishing affinity groups powerful enough to revive canceled
media in new forms and to establish an academic discourse around the materials. In 2010, four
10
years after the end of its eight-season television run on the WB television network Charmed was
given a second life as a comic book due to fans great interest in new canonical content.
Similarly, both the television series Buffy and Angel have each been revived into new multi-
season comic book journeys with their original creator Joss Whedon at the helm. The online
world has offered academic fans from university settings the space to popularize their elevation
of these same source materials into formal intellectual pursuits. Slayage: The Journal of the
Whedon Studies Association gathers a bibliography of conferences, journal articles, books, and
studies taking scholarly aim at Buffy and Angel among other serious fiction textual analysis
(Hornick, 2017, March 27). How have online social environments effectively scaffolded the
advanced writing and textual analysis exercises that Common Core State Standards classrooms
have only hoped to achieve?
Participatory cultures: new media literacies. Some authors have tackled the questions
of the ways in which the Web 2.0 world connect Harry Potter fans or those people engaging with
Wikipedia. As indicated above, teachers and students alike turn to Wikipedia for everything from
trivia location to lesson preparation and research papers. Potter has likewise come to occupy a
powerful role in cyberspace, directly at the center of an emerging culture of online fandom engaged
in complex emergent academia.
In Convergence Culture, Jenkins (2006) documents the “[Harry] Potter Wars”— the
complex battles between Warner Brothers corporate interests, the affinity groups for potter fan
fiction grown online in The Daily Quill, the youth-run writing world of The Daily Prophet, and
J.K. Rowling’s desire to encourage fan writing. He suggests that the emerging convergence
culture spawns moral ambiguities and places societal stakeholder groups to be “struggling with
11
the immersive nature and expansive quality of the new entertainment franchises” (Jenkins, 2006,
p. 204).
The now inactive website named The Daily Prophet, was developed by a thirteen-year-
old home schooled student as a mock-online school newspaper for Potter’s Hogwarts School.
Over time the site became an opportunity for many young people to write autobiographical
profiles integrating their life and the world of the fiction, while others wrote full-length stories on
which they were given feedback. Jenkins suggests that the site offers a powerful interplay
between J.K. Rowling’s elaborately described fiction world and the real-life challenges that
international youth face as they struggle to make sense of their own uniqueness and the degree to
which they fit into a realm of special or mundane (Jenkins, 2006). This represents a powerful
change in the notions of literacy by introducing the premise that teens motivated by positive-
online peer support can exceed the functionality of traditional schooling attempts at furthering
English Language Arts literacy.
Jenkins also presented two Harry Potter fan fiction sites: the still operational Fiction
Alley, a site with 200 plus volunteer staff and 40 hands-on mentors, and the defunct The Sugar
Quill, a site that engaged Potter fan fiction and offered peer-editing and constructive feedback
from other writers from 2001 until 2008 (Jenkins, 2006). He argues that sites succeed where
traditional schools fail by making professional writing feel accessible, activating a critical textual
analysis, taking a community-wide approach to helping newbies find their way, and providing a
participatory culture to support adolescents as they freely explore the environment (Jenkins,
2006).
Neither the Potter Wars nor Wikipedia occupy real space, but both have become forces
for social co-construction of a virtual space with great semiotic substance. The spaces offer a
12
magical environment for teens where they have instantaneous access to collaboration and media
production. This is a far cry from two decades ago where adolescents and young adults waited
for hours to access limited online resources—trying to use PsychLit or PINE. In the post-Y2K
world of file sharing, YouTube, Facebook, Google Apps, bit torrents, DropBoxing, in which
first-world adults are tethered to ubiquitous mobile devices adolescents have followed suite.
Social media binds adolescents and adults in participatory communities where they
exercise freedoms from the conventional corporate notions of information, media production,
and institutions. This has a powerful impact on contemporary notions of schooling.
The school expects every student to master the same content, while Wikipedia
allows students to think about their own particular skills, knowledge, and
experience. Wikipedia invites youth to imagine what it might be like to consider
themselves as experts on some small corner of the universe. (Jenkins, 2007, p. 2)
Learning Technologies: Disconnects and Solutions
Online cultures and schools: The digital divide. Potter, Jenkins (2006) argues, is “a
struggle over competing notions of media literacy” (p.174) within the “informal pedagogy” (p.
174) of the fan community, the school-based influence of Potter to capture readers, the corporate
interests over controlling media production, and the challenges from religious and conservative
influence regarding Potter’s dominance (Jenkins, 2006). The result is a rich semiotic space that
joins youth, imagination, and educational aspiration. As social media and Web 2.0 sites provide
young adults the ability to have meaningful roles as collaborators and innovators, they change
the landscape of what it means to have power over one’s own learning and development.
In the Harry Potter novels, the protagonist experiences a move from outcast to civic
participant in the grandest of battles between good and evil. The virtual world of Web 2.0 and
social media legitimize twenty-first century fandom on their own parallel journey. Convergence
Culture speaks to the new roles of fans and fiction. It posits that individuals occupy a much
13
more pervasive, participatory, and populist role with media. “The new Hollywood demands that
we keep our eyes on the road at all times, and that we do research before we arrive at the theater”
(Jenkins, 2006, p. 104) we are told in a chapter breaking down the ways that the Matrix and other
key franchises have embraced transmedia storytelling. Just as youth are now drawn into the task
of reading texts across multiple media platforms, they are given constant opportunity to
communicate back to the same texts.
It is a role for which they are only partially prepared. Convergence Culture builds on
concepts elaborated by Mizuko Ito drawn from her 1998-2002 Tokyo fieldwork studying
Japanese mass media and examining corporate and familial stakeholder groups and the media
mix. Her assertion from this anthropological view was that virtual and real worlds started to
mutually “colonize” (Ito, 2003, p. 31) each other and generate an existence that comingles,
becomes intertextual producing narratives that cross media and physicality, and impact
boundaries and larger metacognition where children’s fictional and real-world play inhabit a
meta-narrative (Ito, 2003). Her work offered a vision of understanding how fans’ real lives can
both parallel and become participant in the life of story.
Some intellectuals suggest that the presence of pervasive new media production
opportunities allow for “distributed collective creation, co-operative learning and networking”
and claim they “call into question that the functioning of institutions and the accepted forms of
the division of labor” (Lévy, 1997, p. 249). The implication for mass media is game changing—
companies can no longer solely define the spheres of consumer and producer. The numerous
works of Professor Henry Jenkins (Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins 2007; Jenkins et al, 2009) draw on
Pierre Lévy’s (1997) concepts of collective intelligence, and often speaks of the cultural shift
opened by new media technology. According to Henry Jenkins (2006), “Convergence does not
14
occur through media appliances, however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs
within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others,” (p.
4). In this way individuals become a living, breathing part of the medium—participants in the
playful mixing and matching of old and new media.
The theme of backchannel communication runs across the work of Jenkins and Ito
capturing the ways in which new media are “quietly radicalizing a new generation’s relationship
to culture and social life” (Ito, 2003, p. 34) and enabling the consumers of mass culture to send
contribute to a popular culture and then massively share it through digital means and in doing so
“represented a visible, public threat to the absolute control the culture industries asserted over
their intellectual property” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 137).
The result is a shift in individual’s connection to media— enabling cyberspace to serve as
a collective intelligence where living human communities can restore the oral traditions of pre-
history telling their own stories in a post-modern way— moving us beyond the limited run
canonical first era of written communication and the more mass but equally canonical post-
Enlightenment attempts for definitive reference and expertise, (Levy, 1997, pp. 254-255). As
the virtual world becomes a primary space for real world interactions, it privileges unique voices
into collaborative communities of voice. Tweeting, Youtube videos, blogs, and other social
media have allowed unknown teens to turn into authentic pop culture stars—blurring the line of
celebrity. Every year, Youtube stars gain brief or extended popularity, with faint memories of
Bo Burham’s teen cabaret-style comedy stardom or Rebecca Black’s brief summer hit pop
celebrity serving as reminder that we live in a brave new world where social media and online
technologies have literally redefined the way consumer media businesses operate and financially
operate and the quick cycling of such endeavors as grist for the mill.
15
Again, it is a role for which adolescents are only partially prepared. Although they have
increasingly adopted the technological skills, gained a world-wide media stage, and participated
in a large volume of writing exercises, they have not necessarily gained the well-rounded
informational literacy that will sustain their personal and professional ventures for decades to
come.
Young adults have been accused of indiscriminately sharing their most intimate thoughts
and turning their life journey into banal experiences through overuse of social media. Articles
from the Harvard Business Review to the Wall Street Journal have proclaimed the dangers that
the new generation faces in their ubiquitous online personal narrative. These gaps in their
knowledge showcase the 21st century challenge around civic participation— a major challenge
for educational institutions detailed earlier in this chapter. In its modern iteration, civic
participation requires a globalized awareness and utilizes high-tech tools that adolescents mostly
employ socially.
External pressures force our public secondary education institutions to focus on
standardized test scores while also trying to begin to learn performance based techniques that
they had previously marginalized, claiming they were part of small-scale educational reform
attempts. Despite the revived belief in small-schools and innovative methodology spurred on by
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ work, schools still do not seem prepared to scaffold
students’ journey through the media mix. This lack of preparation puts the need for further
integrating civic participation in its 21st century form front and center.
Civic engagement is absolutely vital to help build adolescents’ capacity to engage with
learning beyond school doors. It is this hands-on engagement that colleges and companies prize
in participants— the initiative and know-how to conduct. In his work to elaborate the alignment
16
of assessment, pedagogy, and student performance in the authentic assessment movement, Fred
Newman and associates defined authentic achievement as being comprised of activities that
support construction of knowledge, discipline-based inquiry, and a value to the world beyond the
school (Newmann, Marks & Gamoran, 1995). Based on this definition, what can public
secondary schooling do to connect discipline-specific content to the world outside the doors
utilizing technology?
Can Civic Engagement, Technology, & Schooling Be Connected?
In the twenty-first century world of social media fans engage in the world of mass media
production and consumption blurring the lines like never before and spend time practicing media
and technical literacy without getting paid a dollar or having an ounce of the time mandated as
official learning.
This is not shocking considering that some academics argue that co-construction as a part
of social practices is a key element of engaging learning opportunities. They argue that learners
will be most engaged when involved in “conversations that lead to their becoming part of an
already existing community” and thereby in experiences built on “the actual practice of the target
community” (Bopry & Hedberg, 2005, p. 103). Affinity communities around fandom need not
be the only environment in which youth are encouraged to join practice. There is a robust world
of discipline-specific content online enabling young activists to partake in social change,
supporting young scientists to engage in observation and data sharing, encouraging young
authors to share their writing, and capturing the interest of young mathematicians responding to
challenges in problem-solving.
When Warner Brothers sought to restrict eastern European fans’ writing with cease-and-
desist efforts, the Daily Prophet’s Lawver and British fifteen-year-old writer of a fan guide site
17
Claire Field took on the studio proving Lawver’s assertion that “they underestimated how
interconnected our fandom was” and that many of the fan sites knew and appreciated each
other’s work” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 186). The situation also showcases the power of young adults
using the internet as a means of engaging with real-world entities around real-world issues.
Introducing adolescents to the specifics of the “Potter Wars” and the resultant changes that come
from youth exercising their online will bring alive civic participation in secondary school
subject-content.
In these ways, we see a vibrant community of learners feeling empowered to control their
own learning. This turn of events is portrayed as the exception to the previous history of fights
over what many deem as children’s popular culture. In this case youth empower each other and
develop their ability to communicate their writerly voice in fandom, defining the entire landscape
of new media venues while instructing each other in the most subtle ways on matters of
“globalization, intellectual property struggles, and media conglomeration” (Jenkins, 2006, p.
205) in a way that should make adults stand up and listen.
Implicit in Pierre Lévy’s (1997) description of cyberspace is the idea that the online
environment created a paradigm shift in the twenty-first century, making a virtual worldwide
common space for disparate individuals to engage in communal sense making. Henry Jenkins
(2007) further delves into this communal work in his official weblog as he muses on the
knowledge culture implicitly bonding Wikipedia participants as they collaboratively pool
knowledge and fill in the intellectual blanks. The Wikipedia community is held up to be one of
the many such contemporary online collaborative knowledge ventures, standing amidst massive
multiplayer games and virtual learning climates (Jenkins, 2007).
18
This kind of learning and community seems to inherently possess the qualities that
progressive leaders in both public and private education often idealize. It also suggests a route
for connecting these disparate elements
There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is
sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner
in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process,
just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure
the active co-operation of the pupil in the construction of the purposes involved in
his studying. (Dewey, 1998, pp. 77-78)
Educators interested in equity, social justice, and youth empowerment see value in a
participatory new-media culture. As is widely suggested in the writings of Henry Jenkins (2006,
2007, 2009) and other cultural critics suggest, classrooms still lag deeply behind in this
innovation. If there is an understanding of how the two worlds might connect, then one must
wonder why educators in public schools still struggle to integrate hands-on learning strategies
and technologies to increase discipline-specific civic participation beyond the school’s doors.
The answer lay in the challenges that educators experience in integrating technology, pedagogy,
and content-knowledge.
As the WebQuest phenomenon described earlier in this chapter showcases, there is a
tendency to embrace techniques that flatten the technology experience rather than risking the
messy work of looking at the intersection of all three. The popularity of WebQuests also shows
how teachers can favor controlled and directed experiences when unclear how to most
effectively scaffold students’ explorations. Luckily, there is a range of research that offers
insight into the nature of cognitive scaffolding around technology. Such scaffolding is best
understood through a model of looking for the intersection between technology, pedagogy, and
content.
19
The Challenge to Rebuild a Connection
Introducing TPACK to improve classroom innovation. Since President John F.
Kennedy’s urging for the United States to attain victory in the space race of the 1960s, the
American public school system has tasked with preparing students who can meet competitive
global educational challenges, especially in terms of science, math, engineering, and technology.
As the personal computing technologies of the last two decades became a more ubiquitous part
of competitive global cultures, the American educational system has found a deeper challenge in
properly integrating these technologies. Classroom teachers were urged to provide students 21st
century skills, but left with a very fuzzy picture of how this could be done in a holistic manner.
During the first decade of the 21st century, researchers Punya Mishra and Matthew
Koehler (2006) elaborated a lens of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, which they
began to define and develop through a series of design investigations with educational
technology teams. Their observational and first-hand anecdotal content exploded a schism that
Lee Shulman (1986) had defined two decades earlier in an Educational Researcher article that
noted its origins in a speech he had made the year earlier at a national annual researcher
convention.
Shulman had spoken of an industrial age dichotomy between pedagogical practice skills
and teacher content knowledge, and drove the point home by citing diaries that shared the
narrative of a thirteen-year-old who had once received a one-year Vermont state teaching license
in 1881 merely because she passed written testing (Shulman, 1986). In showcasing this tendency
toward general knowledge over pedagogical know-how he showcased the set-up for educators by
and large lacking an understanding of the concepts and affordances we use in teaching in given
20
circumstances. Innovation in academia and educational content remains a challenge if we are
not clear on the context of our teaching.
Shulman mapped the areas between these separated territories expanding content
knowledge to include: the discipline-specific behaviors and standards that embody content
knowledge; the curricular knowledge that represent a strong awareness of program materials and
benefits; and the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) that incorporates conceptions,
representational forms, and learning trends within given subjects (pp. 9-10). He distinguished
highly effective teaching as recognizing this interplay— which also allowed richer discussion of
the teaching elements within subject areas and among disciplines.
During the twenty years that followed, select researchers expanded on these ideas. In
their seminal 2006 work Mishra and Koehler visualized Shulman’s contribution as speaking
heavily to the intersection of content and pedagogy (p. 1022). Mishra and Koehler (2006) argue
that technology has shaken up the educational concerns involved in teaching and demanded a
new balancing act among content, pedagogy, and technology to define the forms of knowledge
that “expert teachers bring to play anytime they teach” (p. 1030). They argue that several
iterations of their research have led them to see an observational lens that has emerged a
Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK). The TPCK is offered as a full-fledged
framework with the power to integrate research and pedagogy due to its descriptive capabilities,
its application to real-world investigations, and its ability to engage exploration of “inferences
about the causal mechanisms” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, pp. 1044-1047) of technology
integration. By adding the technology dimension, they define and elaborate additional
intersections expanding Shulman’s PCK approach. The figure below showcases their
21
representation of the dimensions that emerge in Mishra & Koehler (2006), as they conceptualize
them now.
Figure 1. Mishra & Koehler’s Visualization of the Union and Separate Elements of TPACK. From
“Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge,” by P. Mishra &
M.J. Kohler, 2006, (http://tpack.org). Copyright 2012 by TPACK.org. Reprinted with permission.
By introducing these additional spaces, Mishra and Koehler (2006) offer a significantly
more complex terrain that adds the affordances of specific technologies, the impact of
technologies on content materials, and the pedagogical implications of which technologies are
the best fit for select circumstances (2006). In 2008, the National Technology Leadership
Summit adopted a definition of “effective technology integration” (SIGTE/NTLS, 2008, p. 23)
that embraced this “total package” (p. 23) conception renaming TPCK as TPACK. Despite its
relatively recent renaissance and the need for ongoing studies, TPCK/TPACK has become an
attractive 21st century research paradigm for studying teaching and technology. It is not only an
attractive paradigm, but a necessary one given the new national requirements for students’ media
literacy requirements.
TPACK and the Common Core. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) propose
core English Language Arts and Math performance standards while also engaging educators to
think about literacy and numeracy across disciplines. This approach fits very naturally with the
22
approach that TPACK takes, looking for the intersection and unique affordances of technology,
discipline-specific knowledge, and pedagogy. The CCSS encourages a rich look at where
English Language Arts and Mathematics skills can be demonstrated across the K-12 curriculum.
The CCSS similarly add context to the skills, opening a dialogue about the function of non-
fiction writing in English skills, the incorporation of digital tools to express literacy and
numeracy, or the application of numeracy, data, and graphing in multiple subjects.
Within the English Language Arts standards for 9th through 12th grade, there are
breakdowns of the literacy skills, writing skills, and social studies/science skills, which should be
developed at each grade level. When looking to the skills that are mapped to the first two years
of high school, there is a discernable focus on a students’ capacity to draw on technology as both
an input and an output tool.
In defining students’ need incorporate research into their actual presentation of their
understanding, ELA writing standard 8 for students in grades 9 and 10 indicate that a student
must be able to
gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources,
using advanced searches effectively; assess the usefulness of each source in
answering the research question; integrate information into the text selectively to
maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format
for citation. (NGA, CCSSO 2010, p. 46)
The 9th/10th grade writing standard 7 within the ELA Literacy items asks that students
can:
Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question
(including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the
inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject,
demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation [in an effort] to
build and present knowledge. (NGA, CCSSO 2010, p. 46)
23
The fourth reading standard, at the same level asks that students can use “vocabulary
describing political, social, or economic aspects of history/social science” (NGA, CCSSO, 2010,
p. 47) while writing standard 9 asks they be able to effectively “compare and contrast” (p. 47)
the treatment of the material across multiple primary and secondary sources.
In so many ways, this pairs with the Jenkins’ skill-sets described earlier. Both hold
common a contention that twenty-first century students must be able to effectively drive along
the information superhighway, developing a skill to know what exists to drive past and what
exists to stop at for fueling.
The Common Core State Standards also present requirements that speak to a student’s
ability to output and share the information in ways that are viewer-friendly providing the
opportunity for public defense, review, and publishing. The ELA Writing standards for grade 9
and 10 include expectations in standards 1b and 2, that students will be able to gather solid data
and evidence that support discipline-specific claims and counterclaims, and then target these into
“informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events” (NGA, CCSSO,
2010, p. 45) that “include formatting (e.g., headings), graphics (e.g., figures, tables), and
multimedia when useful to aiding comprehension” (p. 45).
The sixth ELA writing standard for students in grades 9 and 10, is one which specifies
that the Internet and technologies be integrated at the level of helping students “to produce,
publish, and update individual or shared writing projects” (NGA, CCSSO, 2010, p. 46) and
linking to information in a fashion that is displayed “flexibly and dynamically” (p. 46). It is
these last three standards that truly require students and teachers to develop the rich
understanding of the affordances of Web 2.0 and social media. They require this understanding
24
of how the technologies fit into instruction and learning because they ask both parties to be
engaged in the selection of the most appropriate formats and to be dynamic in use of the tools.
It is precisely these standards that make the nature of WebQuests unacceptable and
relegate them to the past. WebQuests limit both teacher and student exposure to authentic web-
based literacy. The element of choice is key to the development of these skills.
Chapter 2: Leading with TPACK to Explore Social Studies Civic Participation,
Technology, and Problem-Based Learning
This research study proposed to use the lens of TPACK as a framework for
designing, analyzing, and revising a unit of instruction named the Voices of
Representation Curriculum (VORC).
This design-based research introduced and refined specific cognitive scaffolding
techniques to support the VOR instruction for a group of high school social studies students at a
progressive public school in a major northeastern urban district. This process used the
framework of TPACK to better understand the complex interplay of technology, pedagogy, and
content-knowledge in innovations that involve hands-on inquiry in the high school classroom. In
the context of the VORC project research: the content was social studies, namely the government
and civic participation strands; the pedagogical approach chosen was problem-based learning;
and the technologies used were digital media tools made available through Web 2.0 and mobile
social media.
Figure 2. Voices of Representation seen through TPACK lens.
25
26
To best understand the theoretical underpinning that supported this research initiative
requires a greater exploration of TPACK, problem-based learning, civic participation, and the
challenges that have arisen during technology-integration in content-area classroom activities.
These connections became even clearer and more relevant if one considered the Common Core
State Standards that have come to dominate the second decade of the 21st century in America.
These standards have sought to connect classroom learning to higher levels of college and career
preparation— real world applications. The model best aligned to the problem-based learning
approach that has long dominated law and medical school programs. A survey of the literature
shows effective implementation of the model in both higher education and K-12 learning,
demonstrating deep natural connections with the primary and secondary educational theories of
John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and Ted Sizer. Problem-based learning research projects that
incorporate technology offer strong examples of strategies for success.
Civic engagement, as discussed in Chapter 1, is key to supporting adolescents in taking
an active role in the world beyond the school’s doors. As a concept, it grows so nicely from the
expectations we have for high school social studies to properly acquaint young people with the
options for participation in government and the world beyond the school’s doors. This chapter
examines several conceptualizations of civic participation and its power to enhance the high
school social studies curriculum. Several educators’ attempts to effectively bolster high school
social studies with web 2.0 and social media are detailed.
Social media and web 2.0 have offered access to a media mix wherein adolescents
engage participatory cultures. In that capacity, they open the door to a level of civic engagement
not so easily accessed before. Within this chapter, concepts of new media literacies are
27
connected to relevant common core assessment strategies. The result is a vision for assessing
student work and student skill growth.
The Voices of Representation Curriculum unit and this research proposed around it, drew
on the TPACK framework to understand the interplay between technology, pedagogy, and
content knowledge. Chapter two provides additional detail on TPACK’s origins, and hones-in
on elements such as scaffolding, that support innovations.
Design-based research is detailed as a model most appropriate for research to refine these
scaffolds. This is primarily because design-based research allows researchers to situate the
phenomenon they are studying in action that is both beneficial to the participants and relevant for
building further knowledge that can be developed and generalized for other contexts (Barab,
2014).
One can anticipate that scaffolds are important to new learning strategies, but this VOR
project research seeks to establish a cohesive approach to exploring the fidelity of these scaffolds
and refining them with appropriate improvements.
Pedagogical Content Knowledge Enriches Teaching Practice
When Lee Shulman sought to better understand the issues of Pedagogical Content
Knowledge, he followed a group of English, biology, math, and social studies teachers in
California through their educational school preparation year and into their first year of teaching;
his goal was to best understand “the transition from expert student to novice teacher” (Shulman,
1986, p.8) especially as pertains to the development of their “intellectual biography— that set of
understandings, conceptions, and orientations that constitutes the source of their comprehension
of the subjects they teach” (p.8).
28
Through routine interviews with the participants, direct observation of their post-
interview teaching, and data gathering at their teacher educational programs, Shulman was
particularly attentive to the “strategic research sites and key events” (Shulman, 1986, p.8) that
occurred as teachers faced preparing units on material which they found novel, which they only
distantly recalled, or which lacked strong supporting content materials.
To provide a model for talking about the concepts and patterns he felt existed within
content knowledge, he suggested the categories of subject matter content knowledge,
pedagogical content knowledge, and curricular knowledge.
Shulman clarified his understanding of the subject matter content knowledge by
elaborating his interpretation of previous educators’ works which distinguished differences
between understanding the substance of a discipline’s content and practices and the syntax or
procedures specific to that discipline through which someone might test and evaluate
phenomenon. Shulman (1986) addressed subject-context, arguing that quality teaching
demonstrates the ability to vet propositions and materials from amongst alternatives, aligning to
the theoretical and practical hierarchies and syntax of the field (p. 9). In defining this dimension,
he established a way of talking about teachers’ understanding of the nuances of what they were
teaching, and their ability to demonstrate expert choices within the field. This is particularly
relevant to any exploration of innovation or technology in the classroom, because it speaks to the
dimension of teachers’ understanding the subject matter enough to understand the new tools that
are relevant within the field, especially those that are actually used by professionals.
He differentiated pedagogical content knowledge as the expertise in the aspect of content
knowledge that helps an educator understand forms enough to open learning for the learner
through bringing the examples, manipulatives, imagery, forms, and visual representations that
29
make conceptual sense for clarity (Shulman, 1986). In developing this as a separate dimension,
Shulman (1986) helps clarify another aspect that is relevant to thinking about teachers and
innovation. A thorough understanding of the techniques involved in teaching and the struggles
involved in learning are particularly relevant to the process of developing innovative activities
and making them student-friendly—properly supporting the student while maintaining academic
rigor.
Shulman (1986) defined a third subset that he calls curricular knowledge and proclaims
as the least professionally taught and least understood dimension. Within this conceptual area,
he argues two premises. He feels seasoned teachers should have a comprehensive understanding
and ability to deftly select from among all the curricular or teaching material options that exist.
He also argues that mature teachers at the secondary level should have be able to laterally
connect their courses to content from other subjects occurring for students during the same
academic year and to build on the vertical content of the material that has come before and after
within their own subject (Shulman, 1986).
Recent History of Technology Integration Without TPACK Failing
New Zealand educator Louise Starkey (2010) used a case-study of six digitally confident
first-year secondary school teachers to highlight her perceived need to update Shulman’s (1986)
teacher as transmitter of knowledge premises. She argued on behalf of a more connected
mentality in which we reconceive a teacher’s shift from knowledge source to knowledge expert,
gatherer, and redistributor (Starkey, 2010).
Her central argument was that in all six cases the teachers trusted in the potentiality of
Web 2.0 applications and sites but were unable to plant precise pedagogical techniques or
identify theoretical points of connection to ensure their effective execution and students’ gain of
30
content knowledge (Starkey, 2010). Although many of her concerns are answered to in Mishra
and Koehler’s TPCK and the NTLS’s adoption of TPACK as a total package of these complex
layers of interaction, it is perhaps worth noting that Starkey’s (2010) concerns represent a
genuine gap in how teachers are prepared to make use of technology. In her study, she found
that teachers relied most heavily on their past pedagogical knowledge and adapted their work
with students based on pedagogical assessment techniques of inquiring with students how the
technologies were or were not helping them learn. In this way, she points out that teachers in
practice may remain relatively disconnected from a knowledge base that draws them into
understanding the territory with technology and pedagogy intersect.
Starkey’s (2010) argument that many teachers face a lack of a pedagogical model that
incorporates technology effectively plays itself out in many secondary and higher educational
classrooms. Barbara Means (2001) contrasted the growing availability of technology in the
classroom with the failure of supports, resulting in students and teachers not using technology
properly and selecting tasks that don’t really match up to the strengths of the technology.
As mentioned in the first chapter, WebQuests represent a major moment in the
educational technology landscape. As a trendy approach for several years, it represented the key
concerns to which Starkey (2010) and Means (2001) speak. WebQuests illustrate how teacher
and student task selection can be so easily hijacked to what is expedient rather than what is
pedagogically appropriate and discipline-specific.
Some research projects have extolled the values of WebQuests, proclaiming the model as
well “embraced by many educators” (Zheng, Perez, Williamson & Flygare, 2008, p. 296). In his
secondary summary of research on WebQuests, Erdogan Halat (2008) advocates the model
because it: can be motivation for students; can be inspirational as a creative, high order process
31
for teachers; can bring structure and important value to the internet research process; and offers
alternative methods of assessing student understanding that require action. At the same time he
acknowledges that students may not connect with the model if they are disinterested in the
teacher’s constructed scenario or are distracted once encouraged to go to a website by the
WebQuest (Halat, 2008). Although the concerns make up only six lines of the article, they are
quite powerful issues. The Internet as it has grown exponentially over the first decade of the
twenty-first century is simply not controllable to a generation that is more native to technology
than the preceding generations that were accustomed to print media. Based on everything we see
of adolescents on their smart phones and mobile devices, it seems increasingly absurd to assume
that students led to specific websites for a highly-constructed project won’t make any side trips.
In a mixed-methods research project with 33 male and 36 female cohort members in the
Hospitality Management and Leisure Management program at the University of Wolverhampton,
researchers used a questionnaire and focus groups to conduct an exploratory investigation into
the usefulness of WebQuests in higher education. Their analyze the findings as suggesting that
students were 100% behind (79.4% strongly and 20.6% in agreement) the value of using
WebQuests to cover course material, with the only real concerns being about technological
limitations in speed and printing, and the need to do the activities during class time (Hassanien,
2006). Despite the advocacy in this article that the WebQuest offered value to higher
educational students, some educators raise real questions challenging around the purported value
of the model to scaffold inquiry at higher levels.
In a 2007 essay in the Educational Forum, the authors assert: that short-term WebQuests
focuses the participant solely on looking on the web with “no time spent on analysis, synthesis,
and evaluation” (Maddux & Cummings, 2007, pp. 119-120); that long-term WebQuests are
32
incorrectly targeted to the developmentally unprepared primary school students who are not able
to follow through on inquiry due to Dodge’s online assertions that WebQuests can work as early
as third grade; that WebQuest evaluation rubrics fail to account for developmental differences in
learners; and that Dodge himself admits that WebQuests guarantees no particular content
knowledge gain other than “experience in using the Web to find information” (p. 120). The
authors do not portray WebQuests as inherently bad, but rather often misused. Ironically, some
of the same researchers who acknowledge the value of WebQuests raise similar concerns about
the potential areas for improvement.
A 2004 research project with 226 teachers from primary school to higher educational
levels across 20 states, used two instruments to document and deconstruct teachers’ experiences
using WebQuests. The researchers used university servers to conduct online surveys with
participants gathering demographic information and perception on WebQuests’ value with
critical thinking, knowledge application, social skills, and scaffolded learning through a 20-item
instrument using Likert-scale questions. The findings essentially suggested that not all
WebQuests are built alike, being impacted by teacher perceptions, experience, and demographics
while also suggesting that educators should become “aware of the unique features of the
WebQuests to design and develop WebQuests that would benefit learners at all levels” (Zheng et
al., 2008, pp. 301-302).
Dodge suggests that a continuum exists where Web Inquiry Projects represent a more
open-ended version of WebQuests that teachers can utilize. As much as he points to the more
free-form nature on the same continuum, he undercuts the model by saying that the WebQuest
“gives one more confidence that specific curricular goals are being met” (Molebash & Dodge,
2003, p. 162). In many ways, Dodge cashes in on many teachers’ goals of not having a clear
33
road toward how they would personally and effectively integrate technology. Some would
suggest that the strength of this model is that it offers teachers a specific route toward online
content given the span of web content, the lack of clear high quality resources, the connectivity
and maintenance problems of school computing. The claim is made that that the model has
gained popularity from the mislabeled promotion of the activity as constructivist despite its lack
of attention to learners’ developmental capacity (Maddux & Cummings, 2007).
What Dodge cashes in on then is the educational inertia through which pedagogical
innovation is met with equal and opposite opposing forces. A strand of research exists analyzing
the role of teacher belief in the resultant curricular innovation or lack thereof. In Spring 2011, a
research project sought to look how student-centered technology teachers perceived their own
work and best practices. The analysis of the educators’ websites and 35-60 minute semi-
structured interviews identified innovators were motivated to overcome barriers by their own
beliefs, but felt most negatively impacted by negative or pessimistic believes communicated by
the overall educational system those who comment on their innovations (Ertmer, Ottenbreit-
Leftwich, Sadik, E. Sendurur & P. Sendurur, 2012). If those who hold strong beliefs themselves
are fairly impacted on by the challenges of others’ perceptions, it is no wonder that masses
would gravitate toward an easy-to-package model that reduces complex individual and social
learning into a essentially guided electronic tour with project-based artifact requirements.
As mentioned earlier, Barbra Means (2001) offered a vision at the start of the 21st century
which moved classroom activities toward the more authentic—she predicted a shift from
informational hunting and gathering to online collaborations and use of mobile devices by
students gathering information. The limitations toward implementation she suggested, were an
aforementioned failure of a rich approach to conceiving of the interaction of technology,
34
pedagogy, and content knowledge. WebQuests failed to enrich educator’s use of technology not
because they were inherently bad, but because they failed to engage teachers in actually
exploring how technology mutually reshapes their classroom methods or coverage of content
knowledge.
Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK)
In trying to best understand why there has been such failure in integrating technology into
the classroom, we are again drawn to instances in which researchers have studied technology
integration in terms of its conceptual underpinnings in an attempt to define successful best
practices. Mishra and Koehler’s design studies provide us the best model for understanding with
this lens.
What is Technological Pedagogical Knowledge?
Handheld devices, readily accessible media production software, wi-fi and broadband
access, and widespread personal computing have revolutionized the adolescent community into
savvy media critics and producers with more access than ever before. These technologies
situated adolescents in a more globalized world by providing two important things— a hands-on
approach to investigative problem solving and the processing capacity to collect and share data
in unprecedented ways. These mobile and Web 2.0 technologies both support and require
pedagogical practices which allow for a more exploratory learning by doing. Within Common
Core State Standards requesting students to be able to sustain research around problems and their
own generated questions, the methods of problem-based learning are particularly relevant to
position students for technological and academic innovations.
35
Problem based learning as a pedagogical approach. Law schools and medical schools
have been at the forefront of integrating case-based learning as a strategy for teaching students
how to effectively develop a pattern for high context learning in fields where it is impossible to
know all content. The model of generating student-directed learning through well-selected
evocative cases and complex real-world problems is called problem-based learning within
research literature.
John Savery (2006) differentiates the approach from simple inquiry-based activities by
suggesting that inquiry focuses on facilitator mentoring, while the problem-based learning
approach places responsibility for self-directed learning on the students as they try to develop a
solution for a defined problem. According to its proponents, problem based learning is an
approach that takes real-world challenges and engages small groups to work collaboratively to
develop solutions. The best learning problems are ill-structured and require students to actively
explore knowledge and collaborate under the coaching of an expert to develop a solid reasoning
approach to solve the problem (Hmelo-Silver, 2004, pp. 236-237).
The model is not wholeheartedly embraced by all research as flawless. Problem-based
learning became a normative model during the 1980s and 1990s in United States medical
schools. Research and meta-analyses credited the model with increased “clinical problem-
solving skills” (Savery, 2006, pp. 10) but other articles have suggested that research has been
methodologically flawed and failed to establish problem-based learning (PBL’s) short and long-
term superiority.
Even advocates of the problem-based learning model, acknowledge that research has
been limited. Despite admitting limited K-12 research and a trend to use “case study, pre and
post test, or quasi-experimental designs rather than controlled experiments,” (Hmelo-Silver,
36
2004, p. 260). advocates of the model suggest that these research approaches have offered
“converging evidence” (p. 260) on the areas of constructing, solving, and supporting the students
in self-directed learning. It is from this angle of examining the effective usage in higher
educational research that we can see the value-added by the PBL in the classroom and in the
research process.
While reviewing her own previous 1998 quasi-experimental study contrasting traditional
and problem-based learning classes at a Midwestern medical school, Hmelo-Silver (2004)
represented key benefits of PBL in increasing students’ performance. She reflected that students
although students in the two sets of classes did not differ on assessments of “accuracy,
coherence, and use of science concepts” (Hmelo-Silver, 2004, p. 250) in their first week of
classes, that the PBL students became “more likely to produce accurate hypotheses and coherent
explanations” (p. 250) and “use science concepts in their explanations” (p. 250) at the 3 month
and 7 month observation points.
In her work from an exploration of a problem-based undergraduate educational
psychology course in 2000, Hmelo-Silver offers an analysis of student learning artifacts.
Viewing these artifacts from the duration of the course, she determined that early vague
incorporations of theory about schema formation and long-term memory gave way to more
sophisticated descriptions that actively referenced the ideas from wider understandings of
theories on processing (Hmelo-Silver, 2004).
There is also evidence that suggests PBL increases students’ abilities to engage in
constructing and refining their explanations. Hmelo-Silver (2004) reflects on her own past solo
and collaborative work which she argues shows gains in students’ success in two PBL tutorial
sessions or in explaining pathophysiological issues on exams; student group interactions
37
provided opportunities to reflect and refine their understanding, ultimately transferring these
hypothesis-driven approaches into their individual self-directed learning activities (Hmelo-
Silver, 2004). This again shows its value as both a model through which students can
successfully develop discipline specific knowledge. Several research projects have showcased
the specific ways in which technological pedagogical knowledge develops.
The intersection of pedagogy and technology in problem based learning. Some
international research has showcased the intersection of technology and pedagogy through
problem-based learning activities. The Electrical Engineering School and the Computer School
of the University Complutense of Madrid in Spain began offering programming courses in an
online virtual environment that supported student participants in “an enhanced problem-based
learning approach” (Sancho, Moreno, Fuentes-Fernandez, & Fernandez-Manjon, 2009, p. 112)
that grounds 3-D immersive environments, avatars, social learning bonds, and positive competition
to integrate new knowledge as a means to effectively solving game challenges. In the case of this
project, the technology offered an added dimension through which students could expand their
problem-solving into the virtual world.
The software engineering and artificial intelligence department at the university
researched the instructional impact of infusing 3-dimension virtual environments into their
programming courses. Using the immersive challenge based Mundo NUCLEO and Mare
Monstrum environments, students in select courses were engaged in teams of three or four to
solve combat missions in an immersive 3-D virtual environment using their content-knowledge
to save a future-world and medieval world, respectively (Sancho et al., 2009).
The traditional instruction used during the initial 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 academic
years of the research period were contrasted with the Mundo NUCLEO instructional activities of
38
the 2007-2008 academic year and the Mare Monstrum instructional activities of the 2008-2009
academic year. The university used a voluntary approach during the 2007-2008 year that
engaged sixty engineering students and 175 computer science students in an experimental design
that divided them up into either a control group using traditional instructional methods or an
experimental group that engaged students as online warriors in the immersive environment.
During the following year, the research consisted only of 54 participants in the engineering
school for whom use of the Mare Monstrum environment was mandatory (Sancho et al., 2009).
Although research during the two years of non-traditional instruction was heavily
oriented towards examining issues of team formation and student satisfaction with peers, over
45% of students rated the immersive problem-based learning environment as satisfactory, while
just over 45% rated it very satisfactory. Students’ critiques of the team aspects of the approach,
with just under 70% finding it satisfactory and 10% finding it very satisfactory, are heavily
grounded in the instructor’s choices to blend students on the basis of survey profiles exclusively
rather than student choice. (Sancho et al., 2009).
Research data primarily focused on measures of student performance by team role and
measures of satisfaction with the software architecture and team processes. One of its findings
was that students performing in team captain roles had stronger marks and peer approval than
those filling the role of knowledge integrators and communicators (Sancho et al., 2009). Such
observation speaks to the possibility that problem-based learning that encourages legitimate and
flexible participation in multiple leader-follower roles in a community of practice can maximize
student engagement.
The researchers acknowledge the need for more long-term study to increase the value of
their observations, but their quantitative findings during this period speak well for the value of
39
student excitement over traditional content being expressed in more interactive problem-based
models. It offers a more quantitative insight into the powerful ways that technology can
enhance peer-to-peer collaboration in problem-based learning.
The case for problem based learning in secondary education practice. Despite the
aforementioned paucity of secondary use of problem based learning and the limited research that
exists on its value, it is a model for teaching and learning which has been at the heart of several
key educational reformers and visionaries on the primary and secondary level during the last
century.
John Dewey (1998), Maria Montessori (Bagby & Sulak, 2009), and Theodore Sizer
(Muncey & Mcquillan, 1993) have argued that students learn best when the classroom models
the naturalistic way in which children learn language, physical control, and social rules and
games. John Dewey defined during the first half of the 20th century an educational perspective
that remained cutting edge sixty years later as massive educational reform efforts took place in
secondary education. With the exception of programs labeled inter-disciplinary both secondary
and higher education schedules place students in the position of examining specific content that
is delineated by thematic, periodic, or geographic bounds. Whether for reasons of teacher
certification or curricular design arguments, this boxing in of education is firmly counter to the
vision that Dewey espoused in Experience and Education, over seventy years ago. While
reflecting on the development and meaning of purpose, John Dewey offers the example of a baby
observing a flame asserting that impulse and observation is of limited value if it fails to be paired
with previous experiences, including an understanding of the consequence of action. Dewey
goes on to define that intellectual activity in the classroom need rest on the postponement of
overt action, until a foresight borne of “observation, information, and judgment” (Dewey, 1998,
40
pp. 79-81) is possible. His vision has inspired generations of primary and secondary educators to
consider how students could learn by actually having the opportunity to do, make, and create.
A subset of primary educators was equally shaped by Maria Montessori’s (Bagby &
Sulak, 2009) vision of primary education and its naturalistic interdisciplinary ideals. Current
primary school educators trained on the philosophies of Maria Montessori have taken a role in
furthering research on the value of these teachings. In research from 2009, two Montessori
private-school educators summarized their 60 hours of classroom footage, observations, and
interviews with 16 participant students, their parents, and the teachers and teachers’ assistants
who worked with them. The teachers suggest that the Montessori cultural curriculum strand that
blends disciplines often taught separately in other schools, provides students opportunity to
receive facts in context and supports students making connections and linking previous
knowledge (Bagby & Sulak, 2009).
During the last two decades of the 20th century, Theodore Sizer (Muncey & Mcquillan,
1993) reinvigorated the Montessori and Dewey arguments as he brought his expertise as a
Harvard graduate education dean and headmaster at Phillips Academy to critique the state of
public education in his writings. Based on educators’ response to his critique and showcasing of
their best practices, he developed the Coalition of Essential Schools at Brown University
(Muncey & Mcquillan, 1993). Following his 1984 Horace’s Compromise, Sizer continued to
document the state of American public secondary education throughout the 1990s with Horace’s
School and Horace’s Hope. In the process, he helped to define a nationwide education reform
movement that came to encompass hundreds of schools and took the organization to its current
status as a national non-profit organization that has developed these original ideas. The
41
movement spread— by 1996 the Coalition included “940 schools in 37 states and two foreign
countries” (Goldberg, 1996, p. 685).
Drawing on the practical experiences of their member schools, the movement has defined
10 “Common Principles” (Coalition of Essential Schools, 2010, “Common Principles”) that
argue for a “less is more” (para. 2) approach to schooling that privileges depth-based thematic
courses that stress critical thinking skills; designs learning with a “student-as-worker, teacher-as-
coach mentality” (para. 5); and suggests school classroom organization and administration that
offers “democracy and equity” (para. 10) in the classroom and school community.
Like Dewey and Montessori before them, Sizer and his followers have promoted the idea
of a classroom that he describes as essential and engage students in a process of inquiry (Muncey
& Mcquillan, 1993). Among member schools, projects and exhibitions of student work are a
norm. This focus on projects, however, does not necessarily mean that all of these schools
embrace problem-based learning.
The earlier mentioned review of Montessori primary education cited the approach’s
penchant for offering students “contextually rich learning opportunities” (Bagby & Sulak, 2009,
p. 41) that “requires effortful processing of information” (p. 41) as generating a “depth of
understanding” (p. 41) and having similarities to the “characteristics reported in the problem-
solving research” (p. 41). In this finding, we find natural connections between the Dewey,
Montessori, and Sizer vision and the pedagogical practices involved in integrating real world
problems, and even technology and technical skills in these higher education settings through the
use of PBL. We can see the value-added within the primary and secondary grade levels by these
research and teaching methods. This approach speaks well to the technologies and their
integration into the practices of teaching as it offers a model of studying situated learning. As
42
relevant as it is toward pedagogy, it also provides a solid medium in which teachers can be
inspired to utilize such techniques and through which researchers can examine the ways in which
problem-based learning and technology fit.
Problem based hands on learning in secondary classroom. Despite the conservatism
and standardized testing focus present at the secondary level, experiments with integrating PBL
and technology into the classroom have made it through. The actual traits of secondary students—
developmentally adolescent, experience limited, and subject-content naïve— make them a
challenging audience for PBL.
“Determining an appropriate problem for less skilled students requires that the problem
designers understand what is developmentally appropriate, interesting to a heterogeneous group
of students, and moderately challenging without being overwhelming” (Hmelo-Silver, 2004, p.
241). However, some individuals and groups have taken on this challenge of adapting problem-
based learning for the secondary educational system.
The use of online technologies to support secondary social studies education was
documented in a 2009 article investigating multimedia’s capacity to generate positive attitudes
and increase interests in social studies. The GlobalEd project, a five-week unit embedded into
social studies curriculum, had been running in iterations since 2001 and was the subject of three
previous research articles looking at some of the technological, international, and academic
issues. This version of the project engaged eight GlobalEd veteran teachers and two new
instructors to engage 359 first-time participant students from ten middle schools in five states
across the U.S. (Ioannou, Brown, Hannafin, & Boyer, 2009).
The researchers used a quasi-experimental design that consisted of pre and post-test
assessments of knowledge, interest, and attitudes, and of which the participating teachers made
43
voluntary, leading to 190 of the participants being qualified research subjects. The study utilized
a twenty-seven question multiple-choice test at the beginning and end of the program, with a six-
question global environment sub-section that had a weaker then ideal Cronbach alpha for its pre-
test and just over the suggested standard for the post-test. A six-question subscale on social
studies interest organized on a five-point Likert scale was utilized showing a strong 0.85 alpha
on the pre-assessment and 0.87 on the post-assessment). Post-simulation, participants asked to
assess the instructional effectiveness of their online materials, using a seven-question subscale of
five-point Likert items, which collectively showed a strong alpha of 0.88. (Ioannou et al., 2009).
The embedded unit was designed to engage up to 15 classes, each representing a foreign
country, in a simulation of negotiation and communication around conflict, economics,
environment, security, and human rights. Students within a class (country) were divided into
groups that have specific responsibility for in-depth learning on their sub-issue, while still
learning the substance of all issues for their country. They were tasked with the problem or
challenge of negotiating a treaty with one or more classes/countries that addresses all five of the
issues. The simulation’s design engaged the issue-oriented sub-groups in cross-class (cross
“national”) communication through emailing and weekly conferencing (Ioannou et al., 2009).
To examine the role of multimedia, these subjects were assigned differential content to
examine the global environment issues, with the 181 subjects comprising five of the teams have
access to a web site with multimedia content while the remaining ten teams, with their 178
subjects, had only a text-based web site (Ioannou et al., 2009). Beginning three weeks before the
unit and continuing throughout the five-week simulation, students were given access to a
password-protected site specific to their condition group. The sites had counter codes and the
text-only site provided a print-option.
44
The sites provided instructional supports to orient students to energy resources, global
warming, and the politics involved in addressing energy issues. Repeated measures analysis of
variance, RM-ANOVA, were used to provide a more detailed review of participant performance
among the text and multimedia global environment sub-groups and among the non-global
environment participants in both groups who indicated they voluntarily spent a lot of time
visiting the subject matter on the web (Ioannou et al., 2009). The researcher’s findings indicate
that the multimedia group had marginally larger gains in knowledge and interest and used the
web content more extensively. Several issues not accounted for in the methodology explain
possible errors. In their own discussion of the findings, the researchers acknowledge that the
limited size of the sample may have created a Type II error, obscure significance even though it
may have existed. They also admit that despite random assignment of students, multimedia
participants averaged higher baseline social studies interest—therefore creating a ceiling of
increase (Ioannou et al., 2009). Additionally, the fact that teachers printed the text-only site to
support students also potentially contributed to less online usage.
The researchers failed to take account of their survey subjects being majority white, with
ninety percent having home computing and Internet access, and over 40% accessing news via the
Internet, and a majority watching local or national news at times. One might question the
degree of impact that routine multimedia Internet access may fully have on participants being
fully engaged by this simulation model. The designers of the GlobalEd approach have met
some, but not all, of the challenges predicted by Hmelo-Silver (2004) in adapting problem-based
learning for a secondary audience.
The integration of problem-based learning and technology is not, however, exclusively a
phenomenon of western learning environments. Singapore has been the site of recent research
45
to examine the integration of these strategies into the secondary classroom to promote higher
order thinking. Researchers examined student-learning outcomes between two successive
groups of fourteen year-old students in the same teacher’s core geography class at the National
University of Singapore High School of Mathematics and Science (NUS High School).
The quasi-experimental design was generated in response to limitations of school
physical plant and scheduling which prevented random assignment to conditions. The
researchers further built the research project in successive administrations of this course during
the school years of 2007 and 2008 citing a desire to avoid “diffusion of treatment” (Liu, Bui,
Chang, & Lossman, 2010, p. 152) potential data bias due to the Hawthorne effect, and to sidestep
parental or student jealousy around another model of instructional delivery with perceived
benefits being offered.
The twenty-five students who participated in the control group and the twenty-four
students from the experimental group were engaged in a series of three problem-based learning
activities that moved from heavy scaffolding to a more minimal scaffold, with increasingly ill-
structured problems. The assessments of the student reports on these PBL tasks were informed
by a five out of seven questions on a pretest diagnostic that looked at existing geography skills.
The research placed its focus on two areas—initially on determining if the above sources
documented student increases in higher order thinking and, if so, using audio/video interviews,
field notes, and participant interviews to assess how this thinking was promoted (Liu et al.,
2010). The researchers utilized learning theories on the classification of student thinking to
define the cognitive skills to recall, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.
Although pretesting data showed little observable evaluation and creation skills, the mean
performance for both control and experimental groups in all areas except the category named to
46
apply, lacked significant difference at a level of p< 0.05 as confirmed by a sample student’s t-test
(Liu et al., 2010, p. 155-7). Despite the control and experimental groups being similar,
significant differences at the p< 0.05 level were found in all cognitive skills on the post-treatment
assessment—with control group students averaging showing the majority of their skill in the area
of recall, while the experimental group show their greatest strength in their ability to analyze
with an average of three times more skill strength in evaluating (Liu et al., 2010). These findings
are intriguing in part because neither group was deprived of problem-based learning. These
results seem most applicable to our current research efforts precisely because they offer a way to
view the value of infusing technology into the secondary PBL classroom. These quantitative
findings showcase the strength in activating PBL’s idealized capacity to raise students to greater
levels of analytic capability.
Although PBL medical students faced with diagnostic explanation tasks on practicum
were found to have more factual errors in their explanations, they are documented as
demonstrating “more elaborated” (Hmelo-Silver, 2004, p. 250) explanations, evidencing a well-
developed knowledge structure, and thereby showing stronger self-correcting capabilities.
Seeing the infusion of technology into the classroom with these students in Singapore, help us
see the potential bridge over the academic and developmental challenges of the secondary PBL
classroom.
We do not have a clear enough picture of the Singapore research’s demographics.
Although Singapore’s national demographics include a diversity of language and a large
percentage of foreign-born residents, the racial and linguistic diversity is not broken down in the
researcher’s 2010 Journal of Geography documentation. We are provided only with information
that the school is a “specialized, independent high school” (Liu et al., 2010, p. 151). Although
47
the study provides the additional quantitative understanding of methods to maximize the
effectiveness of PBL and technology in the secondary classroom, it does not clearly address the
issue of student diversity present in many United States urban public schools.
The attention to race and socio-economics was more central in the research of Kolodner
and the Learning by Design (LBD) team who examined what went into bringing the best of
project-based learning into the middle-school science classroom. As a centerpiece to the research
article, they highlighted the amalgam of best practice pedagogy provided in their Vehicles in
Motion eight-week unit that assigns students as a research team consulting on the design of
Antarctic exploration vehicles. Researchers measured pre- and post- test changes by combining
written, objective tests to examine content knowledge and video-taped assessments of groups of
four for a performance-assessment of collaborative science methodological skill. Performance-
based assessment findings from the 1999-200 and the 2000-2001 research identifies change in
mixed-achievement LBD groups during the curriculum that supports their demonstration of
experimental design and science methodological to match non-LBD honors students (Kolodner
et al., 2003).
The National Science Foundation, McDonnell Foundation, and BellSouth Foundation
funded research allowed the LBD team to tackle and analyze earth science and physical science
through a process that paired preliminary content launch units introducing key concepts around
scientific collaborative problem solving and then used thematic units engaged the students in
multiple cycles of design-redesign with pauses for collaborative assessment. The 2003 research
article by Kolodoner et al. uses ethnographic observation to collect data that they analyzed as
they vetted Vehicles and their Apollo 13 launch unit through piloting and field testing between
1998 and the article’s publication. They found gains in science content learning amongst LBD
48
participants when contrasted with comparison classes. They also noted that from pre to post test,
LBD subjects with the most socio-economic limitations experienced the largest gains. They
additionally noted that girls participating in the 1998-1999 LBD research moved from lower pre-
test performance to equal or better performance than the male participants (Kolodner et al.,
2003).
The article extensively broke down the design development process leading to translating
existing learning theories that prized transfer into a model strongly applicable to maximizing
middle school science instruction. Their trademarked model is described as having been
evaluated positively by twenty-four teachers and three thousand five hundred students, and
having been “refined using a trial, analysis, and refinement approach” (Kolodner et al., 2003, p
497). The LBD model has packed half-year units of practice-based learning into a series of
physical science building tasks (parachutes, cars, propulsion systems, and disability lifts) and
earth science tasks (modeling a strategy for stopping hill erosion and building a model and
strategic plan for executing underground transportation tunnels).
Drawing on the pre-experimentation with parachuting that followed the pre-unit launch
Apollo 13 viewing, the Vehicles unit provided students an opportunity for testing solutions, and
engages them in three small design challenge opportunities each requiring multiple iterative
design processes and reflection (Kolodner et al., 2003). The article details the mini-challenge
involving propelling the balloon and explores how students were able to gain hands-on design
experience and communal learning through museum-style viewing of each other’s work and pin-
up sessions on the community whiteboard as their instructor gained a robust picture of students’
misconceptions. The LBD curricular vision credited the deep communal understanding serves to
49
support participation in a “grand challenge” (Kolodner et al., 2003, p. 526) through which
students demonstrated their working model vehicle.
Kolodner et al. (2004) outline the specialized needs that arose in adapting techniques that
functioned well in higher education settings to scaffold middle school students to develop a
range of low to high science reasoning learning everything from measuring to differentiating
observation, evidence, and theory. They reviewed multiple theories of design, building,
communities of learning, strategies of learning for transfer, and the cognitive apprenticeship that
inspired their LBD model. The LBD team brought together case-based learning’s iterative
design and reflection process and problem-based learning’s communal reflection supplementing
what students could do in small groups iteratively and through individual diary work
documenting their designs; they blended sequences of whole-class learning (Kolodner et al.,
2003). This created opportunities to introduce new content regarding how and why things work,
reflect carefully and methodically during the design process, allow groups to compare and
contrast ideas during their design iterations, and support instructor and self-assessment for
individuals following design and investigations (Kolodner et al., 2003).
For all the success that the LBD team retells in their lengthy review of conceptual
underpinnings, they save for the end a caveat that their ability to synthesize the best practice of
learning transfer still only served as leaving the need for further practice investigation to
determine what consistent practice efforts are required. The warning provides us a valuable
understanding of how far they feel the data takes their research. For our purposes, however, we
can take several additional things from the research.
We can understand the value of PBL in a diverse middle or high school classroom by
noting the performance jumps Kolodner et al. (2003) report in their early research. Increasing
50
academic performance among heterogeneous groups is most linked to the core of our research
efforts. In addition, the LBD project sought to elaborate on their conceptual underpinnings and
prize the value of design both in their students’ activities and their own curricular development
process. The attention that the LBD team gave to their discussion of the design process, inspires
the value of being design-oriented in one’s approach to research.
Situating mobile & social media in problem-based learning. Mishra and Koehler
(2006) define technological pedagogical knowledge as understanding the “existence, components,
and capabilities of various technologies” (p. 1028) as applied in the learning and teaching process
with an implicit understanding of how the use of these technologies impact teaching—
understanding technological tools and their fitness for the teaching tasks at hand
We see an examination of this discipline-specific application of appropriate technologies
when we look at some research contemporary to Mishra and Koehler’s (2006) that looked at
handheld technologies usage in the secondary classroom. Working with 7-year teaching veteran,
researchers examined the integration of the University of Michigan Artemis Middle Years Digital
Library and the MIT Media Laboratory’s Thinking Tags in a high-poverty majority low-
performing eighth grade class of 33 students at a Midwestern urban middle school (Hug, Krajcik,
& Marx, 2005).
The technology under their scrutiny offered a way to increase students’ engagement and
exploration of an existing biology content unit that focused on the ways in which friends can
pass communicable and sexually transmitted disease. The technology selected included a
database program of science content that would assist students in targeted searching for their
disease investigations, while the handheld programmable objects allowed for a pedagogically
student-centered experience. The open-ended activities with the handhelds created opportunity
51
for students to come to understand scientific method, disease tracking concepts, and critical
problem solving as they explored the programmability and data logs of the devices themselves.
In these ways we again see the ideals of these intersections as the researchers assert that “these
technologies allowed students to ask questions that connected the unit science content and real
life to the investigations and technology used” (Hug et al., 2005, p. 460). It is in this that we see
the intersection of technology and pedagogy— the ways in which learning techniques and
learning technologies come to mutually impact on each other.
Citing its resonance with urban reform efforts, this study prides itself of being the first to
put Artemis through research in an urban environment. Researchers described the findings as
increasing the “understanding of how to design instructional materials using innovative learning
technologies in urban schools” (Hug et al., 2005, p. 449) providing students with “a meaningful
manner” (p. 449) to use the technology. Shulman would be happy that we are talking about the
teacher and student experience of understanding discipline-specific questions and protocols.
Researchers coded and reduced behaviors they witnessed on the classroom footage and
student interviews to assess the value of efforts made during their inquiry, along with looking at
the artifacts of their unit project work (Hug et al., 2005). Although the ten hours of classroom
footage and running interviews of ten students provided limited content, the researchers found
cues in the video and student work that showcased levels of engagement with the technologies
(Hug et al., 2005).
The coding was aligned to the strands of science inquiry proposed by educational reform
efforts, and documented multiple areas of science discipline practice supported by students’ use
of the handheld technology. The Artemis database allowed students to develop and refine their
investigative process and dialogue with classmates. Thinking Tags created hands on
52
opportunities to pose questions about the nature of investigations, and apply them across multiple
investigation efforts, using self within the intellectual problem-solving reflect high levels of
engagement (Hug et al., 2005).
This research fits into the realm of the Mishra and Koehler (2006) concepts in the way it
speaks to the thought-provoking ways in which technologies can affect, inspire, or fuel
innovative teaching methods. Although other researchers and critics have sometimes focused
exclusively on the affordances of the technology itself as a powerful tool, this research affirms
the ways in which technology placed in the hands of students can set off a complex interplay that
alters learning.
The research of Hug et al. (2005) is also interesting in our exploration of teaching and
learning with technology because it grounds itself in a pedagogical model particularly apt to this
form of research—problem based learning. In Hug’s research, the teachers presented students
with open-ended problems for which they were able to experiment with technology usage,
tapping the technology across multiple exploratory iterations. With these mobile technology
examples, we see the value-added with educational technologies when there is some conscious
interaction between technology and pedagogical process. The technology in these examples
really walks the walk and talks the talk of hands-on problem based learning. Unlike the
WebQuests described earlier which construct and constrict the students’ learning experience,
these students have engaged in science-based problem solving that included the hands-on
exploration of technological tools that brought on their own problem-solving experience.
Technological Content Knowledge
Teaching history and studying socially. According to Mishra and Koehler’s (2006)
conception, the ties between technology and more richly thought out pedagogical practices is not
53
the only relationship at which we can examine. They point to the intersection of technology and
content knowledge as another area ripe for thoughtful examination. In this case, we need to ask
ourselves what have technology experiments in social studies classrooms really taught us about
government, economics, and history— what does teaching social studies with technology look
like?
At a southeastern high school of approximately 1,250 with 97-minute social studies
blocks and five networked computers in each classroom, a research team used design-based
research to fine-tune previous research by the team in 1999, exploring how PBL, technology and
history increased students’ to understand the emotional depth behind the historical dilemmas and
their hands-on engagement with content material as opposed to expository strategies (Saye &
Brush, 2002). Their follow-up research documented a two-stage design problem investigation of
an 18-year veteran teacher’s use of the Decision Point (DP) hypermedia application to enhance
her 11th grade U.S. history classes. The first year of research followed the instructor’s
experimental experience implementing PBL and DP in one section, while maintaining her
previous traditional explanatory instructional approach in the other and established engagement
benefits with the DP approach. The second year examined the same teacher’s implementation of
a fine-tuned DP assignment with a single section of 18 non-honors students mandated to the
course, and the research focused on defining curricular scaffolds to maximize the discipline-
specific content (Saye & Brush, 2002).
Citing a limited literature that dually researches student-centered social studies and
technology infusion, the researchers sought to clarify the benefits and proper implementation of
technology-infused PBL. In the DP sections, the technology offered a database of essay,
timeline, and primary source documents through which students were exposed to civil rights
54
content on the legal challenges to segregation, non-violent protest, and Black Power activism
between 1954-1968; the teacher developed day-to-day curriculum within a unit plan and
assigned students a project-based assessment requiring they develop an evidence-grounded
presentation answering, “What strategies should be pursued in 1968 to continue the struggle for a
more just, equal society?” (Saye & Brush, 2002, pp. 80-81). Unlike the WebQuests described
earlier that construct an electronic age book report, this complex question asked students engage
in the history disciplinary tasks of synthesizing evidence to take a position and analyze a series
of historical events.
Through using a seven-standard rubric to evaluate the product of student group
presentations in each section during year one, the teacher and researchers gained valuable insight
showcasing student engagement but reflecting content weakness. This allowed a more finely
tuned exploration during year two to discover the scaffolding required to support technology
infused student-centered learning (Saye & Brush, 2002); researchers combined interviews of
one-third of the section, with triangulated data drawn from their review of the logs of student
pathway exploration in the database, their observation of classroom sessions, and their rubric-
guided analysis of group presentations (Saye & Brush, 2002).
The end result following through multiple iterations of a problem design within one
setting, according to the researchers supports an increased understanding of problem-based
learning curricular development despite its inability to provide generalizations about such
instruction (Saye & Brush, 2002). For the instructor and researchers involved, the progressive
iterations clarified the instructional adjustments of cooperative group monitoring, teacher-led
comparison of findings, and mandatory group storyboarding. The rubric-based assessment of
final group presentations showcased that after these pedagogical tweaks, three out of four student
55
groups demonstrated increased social studies abilities to develop a clear narrative and gather,
interpret, and synthesize evidence while two out of the four had demonstrated increased ability to
reason with evidence (Saye & Brush, 2002). The findings are practice-relevant not because they
prescribe a sure-fire route for increasing student content-area performance, but because they
direct an instructor to areas of potential concern and development in tackling an instructional
focused design problem. Although the study uses the overarching lens of examining the multiple
interactions in TPACK, it gives specific value to the understanding that the technological content
knowledge is an important dimension. It also showcases that researchers and educators can
improve the content-richness of the experience by engaging with technology in an iterative way,
and reading the signs from students’ initial exposure. To have pedagogical initiatives and units
available for such explorations, however, an instructor needed to engage in an initial process of
curricular design. In the Decision Point research there were multiple points at which
pedagogical design choices were made to challenge students with historical dilemmas or
scenarios, to ground assessment with history-skill oriented rubrics, or to scaffold student group
work through formal process of supportive materials.
Other research has examined the ways in which technology has supported contemporary
goals of engaging students in historical inquiry by providing them access to participate in “digital
history” (Manfra & Hammond, 2008, p. 224) which brings students into the role of manipulating
electronic primary source artifacts, texts, and images to develop a cohesive historical narrative.
The researchers chose to study two teachers—one who had be observed as part of a larger study
for twenty-four days during a semester and the other who had been observed during the three
days of his participation with digital documentary making.
56
The investigators looked at one teacher’s work with several seventh grade classes of
different racial combinations and another teacher’s work with a primarily African-American
class, both in urban Virginia, examining student documentary products, the teacher handouts,
focus groups, field notes, and semi-structured interviews hoping to develop a context rich
impression of how teachers’ pedagogical aims, technology, and content fit together (Manfra &
Hammond, 2008).
The researchers frame their examination through the teachers’ pedagogical aims—that is
Mr. Smith’s vision of prepping for the test and making content more alive contrasted with Mr.
Maxwell’s goal of students developing multiple perspectives and “create their own interpretation
of the past” (Manfra & Hammond, 2008, p. 230) building on a specific critical thinking model.
They approached TPACK-lens analysis from a pedagogical perspective and asserted that teacher
pedagogical aim is a dominating influence on outcome despite not being the sole steering
element (Manfra & Hammond, 2008). While pointing out the ability of a teachers’ values
around what’s educationally valuable to shape the students’ history skills education, they
actually end up pointing out a challenge in the marriage between technology and content— that
certain forms of technology do not, in and of themselves, lead a student to a specific kind of
content knowledge. That is to say, that despite the affordance that free online movie-making
software brings to documentary film—the documentary process will not make the student a
historian. Content is at some deep level, often disconnected from the very outside activities in
which they would have professional substance and meaning.
According to some in the field, social studies learning activities take many forms,
distinguish among social studies activities that: build knowledge through students interaction
with information sources; that ask students to express convergent knowledge through a singular
57
common mode of expression; or that urge the development of divergent knowledge expressed
individually by students through either written, visual, conceptual, product, or participatory
action (Harris & Hofer, 2009). While some may talk about the bent that the teachers’ values
about teaching and learning played within their choice of activities, one can argue that these men
were not teaching social studies in a vacuum— they were teaching in a traditional high school
classroom which, by the researchers own admission, were both fairly focused on the Virginia
state standards and testing preparation.
In many ways, a traditional content field in secondary education is often shaped and
defined by the belief in acceptable forms of classroom activities. After all, while an ideal
progressive vision would be for social studies students to get opportunities to serve as historians,
to act as economists, to participate in politics, we must acknowledge that many classroom
experiences find themselves fighting the limits of classroom content as defined by a district or
state office.
Some that seek to integrate technology, however, struggle from the actual limits of
general-purpose technology to adequately capture content-specific knowledge and practices. In a
Spring 2009 semester study at a northeastern university, blogs were integrated into a graduate-
level teacher education course that used content around the Holocaust to spur dialogue on critical
pedagogical exploration of multicultural literacy education (Stevens & Brown, 2011). From
thirteen participants in the course, the researchers drilled down into a qualitative dual case study
that examined how two educators with similar educational backgrounds experienced the course.
Although the cases showcased some critical thinking around the issues, it also showcased
difference among the subject-point perspectives of the two learners. The researchers own action
research take-away was that more student-control of topic was needed to actually motivate the
58
learners to study other genocides as points of connection, and that more explicit blog prompts
were needed to bring students to uniformly higher levels of complexity in their writing (Stevens
& Brown, 2011).
Similar concerns around the fit of content and technology were raised in research on with
8 ninth grade teachers from high school classrooms in seven schools across a south central state.
The researchers recruited teachers interested in implementing a podcasting project into their
social studies economics curriculum, introduced them to the use of the free application Audacity,
and conducted an analysis of the teachers project plans, post-implementation interview
transcripts, observation notes, and pre and post implementation surveys (Swan & Hofer, 2011).
One of the distinctive findings of the research was that it had locked teachers into a
specific technology but given no limitations around content choice. The researchers’ findings
were that none of the teachers had developed a clearly described explanation of their choices for
selecting specific economics content or the timing of where in the course the project came up and
that this was the biggest determinant for specific content coverage (Swan & Hofer, 2011). The
researchers point out that only two of the teachers actually had training in economics, and
suggest that the flaw is that the “general usage” (Swan & Hofer, 2011, p. 90) nature of
podcasting and similar communication tools help students with general expression but fail to
develop content-specific skills—that is “students can express their thinking through podcasting,
but it won’t help them think like an economist” (p. 90). They assert that the technologies most
suited for social studies specific content like Google Earth, the CIA World Factbook, and web-
based digital archives are not tailored for classroom usage (Swan & Hofer, 2011). The emergent
theme in their research is that the more content-specific technologies demand teacher expertise
59
and a student learning curve that is more complex than the general usage software that has
gained popularity.
Civic participation as a form of social studies and social engagement. So how can
teachers incorporate problem based learning and technology to energize a civic participation in
social studies? During the last twenty years, public interest has been particularly concerned with
linking community involvement and the quality of life. Robert Putnam refers to a diverse set of
“empirical evidence” (Putnam, 1995, p.65) from social scientists that suggest social institutions’
ability to function and the high quality of public life are closely connected to “norms and networks
of civic engagement” and intrinsically tied to the “role of social networks” (p. 65).
Researcher Thomas Ehrlich (2000), has engaged in collaborative work to reviewing the
state of civic engagement activities at higher educational institutions, including Oregon State
University, Michigan State University, and Portland State University. While assessing existing
programs they have also expressed a commitment “seeking to encourage colleagues and
universities to strengthen those programs” (Ehrlich, 2000, p. vii). These researchers edited a
collection of essays that developed from an American Council of Education sponsored
conference. Within this text Ehrlich drew on his previous experience researching the topic, and
defined civic engagement as “working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities
and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and motivation that make that
difference” (Ehrlich, 2000, p. vi).
The relevant skills that require development to support this “work with public purpose”
are “the arts of public argument, civic imagination, the ability to evaluate information critically,
the curiosity to listen constantly, interest in public affairs, and the ability to work with others
different from ourselves on projects that recognize multiple contributions” (Boyte & Kari, 2000,
60
p. 51). The authors elaborated on these skills while unpacking the then-recent “Wingspread
Declaration” of higher education leaders and the Campus Compact issued at a presidents’
meeting. Ironically, these skills are very much aligned to the Habits of Mind approach embraced
by the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Common Core State Standards that are now
espoused as a national standard.
While commenting on a 1997 study of Debra Humphreys’ then three-year-old review
assessing general education programs at “nearly 100 two- and four-year colleges,” C.G.
Schneider (2010) suggests that although grounded in “the aspirations to justice, equity, and
democratic accountability that are both central to American history and yet only partially
achieved,” the courses do not engage critical analysis of “the value of equality itself” (p. 119).
This highlights the challenge of capturing a rich exploration of civics without actually engaging
students in the civic participation.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York and The Center for Information and Research on
Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) 2003 report on “The Civic Mission of Schools,”
advocate for this education to first occur in primary and secondary education, asserting it is vital
for several reasons: research suggesting that social responsibility and politics interests develop
prior to age 9; the cognitive linkage between “critical thinking and deliberation” (Gibson &
Levine, 2003, p. 12) skills and the content knowledge associated with civics and politics; the
heterogeneous deliberative and interactive climate of schools; the presence of caring adults who
served as mentors; the mandatory requirements around participation in schools; and the relative
disappearance of large-scale institutions outside of schools that might provide these engagement
opportunities for youth (Gibson & Levine, 2003). This report drew together the writing and
discussion viewpoints of fifty-seven non-profit, municipal, educational, and cultural institutional
61
leaders in the social studies, higher education, educational administration, curricular, research,
and civic education study fields from local and national level organizations.
Other researchers who have done hands-on fieldwork around civics courses in the
secondary curriculum share the view that innovative high school civics efforts are urgently
needed now (Daly, Devlin-Scherer, Burroughs & McCartan, 2010; Dávila & Mora, 2007;
Hutchens & Eveland, 2009; Kahne & Sporte, 2008; Kahne, Chi, & Middaugh, 2006; McIntosh,
Berman, & Youniss, 2010; Phillips, 2004; Rubin, Hayes, & Benson, 2009).
Using a quasi-experimental design, a research team examined the implementation of the
Constitutional Rights Foundation’s Cityworks curriculum at both urban and suburban schools.
By examining six teachers from five Los Angeles area schools, looking at the experiences of 231
students with pre- and post-surveys, and utilizing some teachers who also had U.S. government
classes not utilizing the curriculum, the researchers were able to contrast control classrooms (77
students) to their experimental group (154 students) and compare the experiences (Kahne et al.,
2006).
Through examining students’ agreement on items focusing on norms of political and
civic engagement, awareness of social networks in this arena, and trust in institutions, the
researchers identified gains among students who participated in the civics curriculum around the
survey’s measures of participatory citizenship and justice oriented citizenship at a p-value of less
than 5% and personally responsible citizenship and knowledge of social networks at a p-value of
less than 10% (Kahne et al., 2006).
In the researchers’ closer look at each classroom they saw ways in which teachers’
execution impacted the outcome and found connections among the researched measures and the
curriculum’s techniques of simulations, service projects, and exposure to role models, promoting
62
an overall reason to believe that an experiential hands-on civics curriculum has value for
improving measures of civic engagement (Kahne et al., 2006).
Researchers have examined the effect of civics action projects on secondary classrooms,
in one case using Project Citizen. This Center for Civic Education program was implemented
over a two-year period by groups of second-year teacher education students in their final
semester. These twenty-four teachers in year one from all subject content disciplines were
assessed for their awareness of public policy and for their conceptions about urban education,
through a pre-intervention survey. They then had the opportunity to share their experiences after
the program through both surveys and focus groups (Daly et al., 2010). Year two teacher
education participants were assigned to work with a single teacher that had curricular experience
with this program and benefitted from organizational and scheduling efforts that had not been
present during year one.
Previous research cited to S. Root and J. Northrup established the value of Project Citizen
to assist secondary students with their persuasive writing skills, civic literacy, and civic
development. Daly’s team had discovered during year one positive feedback only through the
focus group, where the teaching students indicated that they had learned aspects of public policy
by helping secondary students with their portfolios for the action project. During the more
organized year two, they had discovered on both the surveys and focus groups that the teacher
education students felt that whole interdisciplinary approach in Project Citizen educated them on
policy, and their secondary students on “active citizenship” (Daly et al., 2010, p. 126).
The researchers’ population was limited to a group of less than fifty teacher education
students at one university. The qualitative feedback from the research, however, still suggests
63
that prospective teachers identify valuable gains in civics knowledge and participation from
project-based learning activities.
Within the racially diverse Columbus Public School district, representing an urban area
of nearly three-quarters of a million citizens in Ohio, researchers conducted a longitudinal study
one year after students were exposed to a civics curriculum using multi-level modeling to
examine connections between social communication learning activities and traditional
memorization of civics details and the schools, courses, and teachers.
The researchers engaged social studies teachers across the district to complete surveys,
using district-level information on the students in classes of the 67 respondent teachers to set up
student and parent surveys. One year later the researches brought the original 202 student
response up to 896, reengaging non-responders as well as the original group—by the use of $7
stipends and a local research firm. The study ultimately found that neither approach supported
increased civic participation among these students, but that teachers, schools, and specific course
differences did have impact on the students and their content knowledge and participation.
(Hutchens & Eveland, 2009).
The details of the research suggest many flaws with its teacher-driven approach to
reporting of classroom activities and its relatively small sampling population relative to all
students who participated in the social studies courses. What is interesting, however, about this
study is two factors it evidences.
First, it indicates that the nature of environments in which the learning activities takes
place have an effect on the student learning experience. The implication is that recognition must
be paid to teacher and course design differences. One might view this as debunking the idea that
64
a one-size-fits-all curriculum model can exist in a vacuum. This supports the need for teachers
to take a conscious and conscientious role in customizing civics curricula.
Second, it suggests that race and socio-economic factors contribute to the civic
engagement values that students hold. This implication has been studied by other researchers,
including one interpretive study follow-up that looked in detail at the implementation of a
problem-based curriculum previously offered in a U.S. history high school course at the 1,314-
student Surrey High School. The school’s population is 98% non-white and the participating
teacher is an African-American male teacher residing in the school’s community, applying his
four years of experience to a highly mobile population of special needs students. Its primary
findings identify a “disjuncture [that shows] a contrast between the civic ideals of the United
States and students’ daily lives” (Rubin et al., 2009, p. 215).
Although the study was limited in its size and scope, it provides percentage data on the
students’ self-reporting of whether they felt their neighborhood or school was safe, or whether
they had any faith or trust in government. In response to multiple questions, nearly 9 out of 10
students had experienced prejudicial police behavior, witnessed community violence, and felt a
strong sense of societal injustice. However, over 9 out of 10 students also indicated that they
would volunteer to help those in need in their community and would work with community-
based groups to solve problems. Students anecdotally reported that they learned more in this
teacher’s social studies course due to their extensive writing and reflective opportunities on their
own sense of identity and experience (Rubin, et al., 2009, p. 217). The implications of this study
on research at the school site are two-fold. First, quantitative details suggest that students’ own
disconnection from American ideals do not necessarily present a conflict to student participation
in civic community-based activities. Second, the nature of this study suggests that when given
65
the opportunity to reflect on their own sense of identity in relation to notions of both real and
ideal American communities, that they are able to engage with civics material and draw robust
conclusions.
The impact of participation and deliberation around student governance were the subject
of a recent working paper that reviewed research data that was collected beginning in 2003 to
establish a five-year evaluation of Hudson High School’s efforts in that arena. The school’s
newly built space created opportunities for these clusters and their adult staff support teams to
come together and democratically run the clusters through weekly one-hour meetings. They had
developed clustering programs that allowed groups 100-150 members of its diverse 1,000
member student body to connect around common bonds of academic themes like
“communications, media, and the arts...business, engineering, and technology” (Mcintosh et al.,
2010, p. 4).
Annual senior data was compared to an initial senior baseline to examine students’
behavior, skills and attitudes. A two-year cohort was followed through their four years in the
school. Researchers used a combo of teacher and alumni surveys, senior focus groups, district
staff members, interviews with successful students, and graduates municipal voting data to
conduct both qualitative analyses of the focus groups and quantitative analysis of students’
municipal involvement. Despite the relative chaos of the school clusters’ attempts at governance
with ill-defined supports, professional development, or boundaries, the quantitative data shows
student gains in community service/participation within the school, political knowledge, and
slightly increased community concern, despite decreases in the sense of social tolerance, freedom
to speak, and believe in the school’s efficient governance. Qualitative data has documented the
growth of student affinity groups to mediate the failures of governance occurring during the
66
larger cluster municipal style plenary (Mcintosh et al., 2010). This study offers an interesting
perspective that engaging systemic initiatives within a school community can foster systemic
increases in student understanding and involvement in civic participation. Students tasked with
actual participation in governance activities gained a rich understanding of the ups and downs of
politics even when their own political aspirations failed to achieve desired goals. They learned
through the process of trying to effect change.
One dissertation study at Yale University engaged 260 juniors and 207 seniors in the non-
magnet program at Long Beach Polytechnic High School in two field experiments regarding
increased practice activities in local politics and increased participation in school-based
extracurricular activities qualifying them as service learning, and sought to use “culturally-
sensitive” (Phillips, 2004, p. 2) measures looked at “whether these activities actual affect civic
knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors” (p. 2). The executive summary of the data asserted that the
data finds a relative lack of impact from role-plays and simple problem-based activities in
effecting change with inner-city students around civic participation issues like voting. He also
expands the notion of civic participation, and identifies that a large population of students
express more extensive civic ties and involvement in religious and ethnic associations within the
urban community (Phillips, 2004).
In the Yale study, nearly one-third of the students were found to have been heterogeneous
in their involvement ethnicity organizations beyond their own identity (Phillips, 2004). This
portends the power of voyaging outside the school’s doors to connect students with larger more
diverse constituencies and sets of politics, dissimilar to their own.
Many of the research studies of civic engagement take their focus on intervention at
individual or small groups of schools within a district. In a larger-scale examination of 52
67
schools in Chicago and their 4,057 students, the team of Joseph Kahne and Susan Sporte (2008)
utilize a dataset developed by the Consortium on Chicago School Research and administered in
the school system and investigated students who participated in the 2003 administration as
freshman and the 2005 administration as juniors. The researchers used indicators that offered
single-item responses on a four-point Likert-style scale and also used multi-item measures that
were analyzed with Rasch modeling in an effort to create exploration of specific issues of
interest to the researchers and having a grounded relationship to those sets of items (Kahne &
Sporte, 2008).
They study concentrates on community-based forms of participation over traditional
forms participation in political activities. Researchers attempt to draw on previous research
models that connect individual agency, social relatedness, and political-moral understanding.
Through investigating the teens’ membership in a group, teacher caring, and peer support they
try to examine students’ increased civic participation as defined by a five-item measure that asks
student likelihood to work on community-based activities, programs, and projects, while seeing
them and their community’s improvement as central to their responsibility. (Kahne & Sporte,
2008).
In an effort to isolate the impacts of group and community factors, the researchers also
used hierarchical linear modeling, but found themselves unable to apply a theoretical or
operational approach that would successfully take the data set they actually had and allow for a
classroom-by-classroom analysis. (Kahne & Sporte, 2008).
Ultimately, in their examination of various characteristics they found that demographic
differences among students explained little variation in civic participation, while upbringing in a
community filled with civic participation and social capital did impact students’ civic
68
participation. Supportive peers and sense of belonging at school did contribute positively
toward civic participation as did non-sports extracurricular participation. Most importantly, the
0.26 variance explained by service learning opportunities and the 0.41 of classroom civic
learning opportunities that involved providing students the space to analyze current events,
debate controversial issues, tackle community problems, connect with civic role models, and
address issues of personal importance, were defined by the researchers as the most powerful of
the study’s findings. They emphasized the power of students’ experiencing social capital (Kahne
& Sporte, 2008).
The study reaffirms the value of dialogue, written self-reflection, and assignments that
require students to go out into the community. Collectively, the research on assessing civic
engagement suggests that interviews and interactions with role models, opportunities to directly
participate in governance at the school and community level, dialogues within classroom
structures to address meaningful issues, and reflection on individual identity all contribute to a
rich understanding of civics.
Technology, social media and civic engagement. As a 2009 MacArthur Foundation
funded research initiative sought to shift dialogue away from questions of youth access and the
digital divide and proposed a working framework for viewing new media literacies, it engaged the
important question of exactly what skills might be delineated. It proposed a collection of eleven
skills informed by traditional literacy and research, technical, and critical-analysis skills, namely:
play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, negotiation,
judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and collective intelligence (Jenkins et al., 2009).
Many of the skills speak to the new internal cognitive processes an individual must adapt to prepare
intellectually, emotionally, and creatively for communicating amidst online media.
69
The final three skills speak to the tasks particularly key to an individual finding success
in the interactive parts of their civic participation. Transmedia navigation speaking to the
individual’s efforts to “follow the flow” (Jenkins et al., 2009, p. xiv) as they engage “multiple
modalities” (p. xiv). Networking speaks to their synthesis and sharing of the information, and
the collective intelligence speaks to their ability to “gather online to embrace common
enterprises” (p. xiv) in the “socialized or communalized media that is central to the culture of
media convergence” (p. xiv). Beyond suggesting strengths that a student might develop, these
three skill-sets provide a means of assessing students on the qualitative aspects of their
participation.
This research project draws on Henry Jenkins’ proposed fields within its own research
tools, by including these three dimensions as part of rubrics used to assess instructional activities
and instructional rigor. Jenkins speaks to the application of these skills throughout his 2006
white paper on civic participation and adolescents. He illustrates collective intelligence by
remarking that “as players learn to work and play in such knowledge cultures, they come to think
of problem solving as an exercise in teamwork” (Jenkins, 2006, pp. 39-40).
Jenkins applauds geographically disparate schools in studying common problems and
sharing their data collection as a demonstration of collective intelligence as “Such knowledge
communities can confront problems of greater scale and complexity than any given student
might be able to handle” (Jenkins, 2006, pp. 42-43). He further clarifies that students in civics
classes might use “a Wikipedia-like program” (pp. 42-43) to share reports on politicians,
government meetings, policy debates, and public goings-on to allow for a dialogue amongst
youth across the country to better allow them to understand local political events.
70
With transmedia navigation, Jenkins notes Ito’s (2003) recognition of the
“hypersociability” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 47) that emerges as youth trade notes and artifacts from
their favorite transmedia television shows; he also notes findings about youth’s following of
character iconography, particularly Spider-Man, across film, television, video game, comic, and
toys (2006). Where Jenkins’ conception contributes to this research project is in his clarification
offered a page or two later, where he indicates that “students learn about multimodality and
transmedia navigation when they take time to focus on how stories change as they move across
different contexts of production” (pp. 48-49); he goes on to share about an MIT New Media
Literacies project that engaged students to tell stories across IM, Powerpoint, video, and
drawing, analyzing tool affordances and identifying what threads they kept common for viewer
accessibility (2006).
Perhaps the literacy on the list which most resonates with civic participation is the
networking literacy which is described as a student’s ability to successfully navigate amidst the
constantly transforming informational world by successfully tapping into Web 2.0 and social
media Google (http://google.com), Amazon (http://amazon.com), Del.icio.us (http:Del.icio.us),
Facebook (http://facebook.com), Twitter (http://twitter.com), etc.), recognizing the biases, and
successfully deciding whose informational resources are to be trusted and corralled into official
research and change efforts. Put simply, “If transmedia navigation involves learning to
understand the relations between different media systems, networking involves the ability to
navigate across different social communities” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 50). He describes elementary
students’ efforts with online newspapers and podcasting as tools for sharing their work and high
school students’ successful primarily online public advocacy in Los Angeles to protest around
immigration issues (Jenkins, 2006).
71
Jenkins and his team are not the first to recognize that new media skills or literacies could
be relevant to civics through documentary and oral history.
The Persistent Issues in History Network (PIH) has developed a curricular model through
which exemplary lessons, databases with over 1,400 artifacts on the civil rights era, and graphic
organizing tools are made available to teachers so they can scaffold students in developing such
skills toward having a “nuanced understanding of history required for civic competence” (Saye
and Brush, 2005, pp. 168-171).
They are not alone in their efforts to activate the world of web 2.0 and social media
around civic participation. Classic social studies lessons engaging students to critically analyze
primary sources on the primary and secondary school level have been affected be increased
levels of access and available tools. Web based software, like Primary Access, provides students
with the opportunity to “acquire data, remix and reinterpret data, and report the results in a
media-rich format” (Bull, Hammond, & Ferster, 2008, p. 280) on the web and to share the online
primary source documentaries with peers and other instructors. Providing students a hands-on
opportunity to work with these multimedia non-fiction storytelling techniques support the
development of both Common Core State Standards and Jenkins’ new media literacies.
Assessing students’ participation in civic engagement. So much of the research included
in this chapter showcases the ways in which technology has served as a tool to support pedagogy
and content-knowledge. As technology supported the use of problem-based learning and civics in
social studies, its implementation was mutually supported by the pedagogy and disciplinary
approaches. The TPACK framework points us toward the intersection of these elements, where
the need for cognitive scaffolding consistently appears. To understand the skill-sets of civic
engagement to scaffold, it is vital to understand the types of engagement that can be assessed.
72
The assessment of projects that seek to expand students’ civic participation is no easy task.
In his description of the challenges of their higher education work described earlier, Thomas
Ehrlich (2000) indicates, “At each of the campuses we have visited, as in higher education as a
whole, assessment of student outcomes is the least developed component of the overall effort to
foster student moral and civic development” (p. xxvii).
In one research effort that sought to provide meaning and definition with the conceptions
of youth civic engagement, the researchers organized two-days focus groups stratified by age,
where typically 10 individuals from politics, community service learning and organizing,
academics, religious leaders, and union organizers could come together and brainstorm about the
characteristics of politics and civic life. The 11 group sessions held in a mix of four states that
span the country (Northeast, West, South, and Midwest), and found themselves able to
qualitatively explore terminology and imagery around community involvement (Andolina,
Jenkins, Keeter, & Zukin, 2002).
The biggest findings that the authors extracted from the collective dialogues were that
words carried great weight and heavily influenced how participants might define their civic
participation. Generally, the participants saw much more of their own activities in the world as
forms of volunteerism, eschewed most formal politics and good citizen civics obligations as
oppressive and carrying a negative resonance, were connected to the diversity of the world around
them, and offered their own original critical agenda of community and world issues shaped by
connecting with new media outreach techniques. (Andolina et al., 2002). This information is
valuable when considering secondary social studies projects that seek to connect students with the
larger political landscape. It suggests that students can gain a robust understanding of inspiring
civic change by having an active role in the language and shaping of new media campaigns. Put
73
simply, engaging students to produce new media campaigns supports their best understanding their
own involvement and role in the civic process.
One research project gathered surveys during the 2004 election campaign, from 1,924
secondary students, largely 11th and 12th graders, distributed among 88 social studies classes in the
Northeast. Pre-survey and post-survey events were scheduled to bookend the election itself and
engaged students in the self-assessment of possible involvement in community-based and political
activities, along with their predicted responses to imaginary scenarios. Using “rotated principal
components analysis” (Flanagan, Syvertsen, & Stout, 2007, p. 2) and “structural equation
modeling” (p. 2) the researchers felt they were best equipped to “tap a larger meta-concept ideal”
(p. 2) and come to understand the psychometric properties of their questions. The researchers
share the questions from their instruments with their Cronbach’s alpha score, providing concrete
strongly reliable measures. The research affirms the value of engaging students in scenarios and
document-based tasks surrounding research to provide baseline information.
A Kellogg Foundation funded effort that gathered community builders from within the
Building Movement, the Ms. Foundation, and the Alliance for Children and Families in 2008, and
engaged with Connect Grant recipients in a March 2009 Civic Engagement Evaluation Summit in
Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico. The 26 conference participants were able to examine case studies
and apply and reify what the collaboration had been learning about assessing evidence of civic
participation and change. The resulting observations, summarized as the challenges of assessing
civic participation defined: civic participation as a non-linear item that can be viewed through the
tensions between individual, community, and programmatic impacts; identified the requisite use
of single and multiple case studies that examine the mechanisms of change; urges funding changes
which drop the model of requiring control groups or viewing organizational development as a
74
factor of the participation assessment; owned the need for a definition of the desired change;
accepted the paucity of assessment tools; and reflected the year or multi-year time frame of
participatory change that often exceeds the period of evaluation (Building Movement Project,
2010).
Put simply, the research suggests that assessing student participation in civic engagement
need involve them in activities that capture cultural values and construct first-hand testimony that
elaborates their voice and vision.
The decision of the researchers to draw on first-hand testimony and participant led case
studies allowed a diverse group of community activists to retain voice and engage the entire
conference in collaborative research. Participants were thereby able to perform a check of the
researchers’ conclusions. The process showcased the incredible value of voice in research and
assessment of civic engagement, suggesting the need for increased usage of techniques that retain
voice and a diversity of case study information.
Researching Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge
This chapter has detailed a number of ways in which technology innovation has mutually
support and been informed by the pedagogical strategy of hands-on problem-based inquiry. In
detailing the way that Web 2.0, social media, and mobile devices have supported student-led messy
exploration, a more finely tuned picture of innovative pedagogy has emerged.
Through the examples of technology infused into social studies in this chapter one can see
myriad ways in which non-fiction multimedia construction and tasks that involve dialogue with
the world beyond the school’s doors can enhance disciplinary learning.
75
The use of the TPACK framework allows us to connect these two dimensions further by
looking at where they mutually constitute each other— where technology, pedagogy, and content-
knowledge have a mutual effect in reshaping each other.
TPACK: A subject for study. It is entirely possible, for example, for a teacher’s focus to
be on a specific pedagogical approach to student engagement in which the technology involved
does not include multimedia resources and simply relies on paper and pencil. Likewise, it is
possible to develop lessons that focus a learner on the concrete skills of manipulating text within
Microsoft Word without any subject-content knowledge or overarching pedagogical goals beyond
printing their name in four sizes. In many ways, the early years of technology integration and
exploration in the classroom sometimes saw lessons that when viewed through modern eyes
epitomize the disjoint of these sets. In the later years of the twenty-first century’s first decade,
educators were becoming more explicit in looking for the union of these elements—trying to link
technology in the classroom to a more conscious exploration of the subject.
In a brief overview, the authors unpacked the TPACK approach identifying different
pedagogic functions digital video activities could embrace within specific discipline-content
fields. The authors cite TPACK as a “mechanism for exploring” (SIGTE/NTLS, 2008, p. 24) the
best ways to “employ emerging capabilities” (p. 24) unique to those areas, for example: allowing
students to play and modify new physics concepts they are exploring, to conduct first hand
historical inquiry; to represent visual imagery in literature; and to render trigonometric
mathematical concepts (SIGTE/NTLS, 2008). This kind of clarity truly makes technology a
more effective tool—as it recognizes that a tool ideally need be linked to the functions that it
may best perform in a specific context.
76
The conceptualization of TPACK is helpful not only to distinguishing the ways in which
technology can be used, but also to assist instructional leaders in viewing their curricular design
process. TPACK supports instructor’s intentionality, because it provides a language for those
who work with technology-infused curriculum to define the context of their content.
As researchers began to expand investigations of the elements defined in TPACK-
technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and content knowledge- some sought to better
understand the implications of breaking these down the concepts into factors and scales
(Archambault & Barnett, 2010; Kabakci-Yurdakul et al.,2012) creating a better elaboration of
measurement and function.
Some researchers focused on the areas of intersection and union, looking each element
individually, at technology-pedagogy, technology-content, and pedagogy-content, along with the
total package of TPACK. The researchers used think-aloud piloting and two rounds of review
to establish their 25 item Likert scale tailored design survey, gathered from 596 K-12 online
teachers from twenty-five states, one-third of those they surveyed (Archambault & Barnett,
2010). In reaching out to professionals in the field, the majority educational and-or subject
content master teachers, the researchers asked those with the greatest practical experience
thinking about TPACK to further define it.
Using SPSS to run a series of statistical methods including factor analysis for construct
validity, Cronbach’s alpha, Pearson r correlations on subscales, and a Corrected Item-Total
Correlation the researchers overall scale held an internal consistency of 0.94; its findings on the
subscales however “indicate that the highly accepted seven mutually exclusive domains of the
TPACK theory may not exist in practice” (Archambault & Barnett, 2010, p. 1658) charging only
pedagogical content knowledge, technological-curricular content knowledge, and technological
77
knowledge as unique practice concepts (2010). These domains standing as distinct support the
earlier conceptualization of content-specific applications of technology being most powerful.
During the later phase of the think-aloud process, researchers got a first-hand education
from their test subjects regarding the challenge of clearly labeling difference-- to which domain
an individual survey question belonged. Limited by the self-reporting of respondents and the
lack of subject-specific questions, the researchers still managed to define very real challenges for
professionals to separate distinct elements in TPACK. They findings stressed “the importance of
content knowledge when incorporating the use of technology” (Archambault & Barnett, 2010,
pp. 1659-1661).
Another attempt to quantitatively drill down into the constituent elements of TPACK
occurred at a two-phase research effort in Turkey, through which conference gatherings of
instructional technology educators developed and refined a collection of items that sought to
establish TPACK indicators. The-36 item scale that resulted from the collective intellectual
work of the 10 reviewers, twenty-four workshop participants, and nine original educational
technologists was used with 995 pre-service teachers at Turkish higher educational institutions
during the 2009-2010 school year. In dividing the respondents into two groups and assign
normal distribution and a factor analysis through a series of successful statistical tests, the
researchers identified that nearly 60% of variance in the scale was explained by the factors of
“design, exertion, ethics, and proficiency” (Kabakci-Yufdakul et al., 2012, pp. 966-968).
Beyond simply detailing these four factors, the researchers looked at how much variance
each factor explained—finding that nearly one-fifth of the variance was explained by the design
factor and another one-fifth explained by exertion. In their line item definitions, the researchers
elaborate these instructional skills to focus on the proper assessment of the baseline situation; a
78
thoughtful analytic selection of methods, techniques, and technologies; the preparation of
activities; the gathering of materials and measurement tools to assist in the teaching process; the
active learning, and the measurement and evaluation of the effectiveness of the teaching process
(Kabakci-Yurdakul et al., 2012). In these traits, we can see similarities with the other research
and its suggestion that the focus on technology’s role within the pedagogy and value-added
impact on content is key. The next highest explanation of variance focuses on the technology
and problem solving, which is also consistent with the three dimensions defined by Archambault
and Barnett.
Some efforts to elaborate on the TPACK model have avoided quantitative measures, and
instead focused their effort on creating a snapshot of how this works in practice. In a Computers
in the Schools article from 2008, researchers expand on previous work they did with in the
secondary history classroom with the web-based Primary Access tool. They highlight how
contemporary three-minute documentary assignments on Civil War tensions and secession
represent a traditional implementation of engaging students to draw on primary sources to adopt
an historical perspective and generate a product that captures the detail and perspectives
surrounding the event (Bull et al., 2008, p. 276). The research on TPACK begins to come alive
in observations like this—we see the connection of the content knowledge on the Civil War to
the pedagogical content of engaging students in the practices of historians, along with the
technological infusion of a free online program that assists them in gathering the primary source
images and documents into a final documentary product.
The researchers additionally share anecdotal information on a Kansas State University
professor’s digital ethnography assignments to students, linking the resulting product in both the
high school and college classes mentioned to a larger cultural phenomenon. The researchers
79
refer to the Pew Internet and American Life Project findings on Internet usage and Tim
O’Reilly’s “Web 2.0” (Bull et al., 2008, pp. 280-282) concepts to suggest that TPACK’s
framework of content-specific technology infusion can best be achieved through the harnessing
of online participatory culture- engaging students to become remixers and producers of academic
content that can be in turn shared for others’ usage (Bull et al., 2008). The connected
environment the researchers describe allows the students never before seen levels of access to
external data, and the ability to prepare shareable material that embodies their subject-specific
learning.
Beyond the benefits of the medium, the authors also extol the affordances that web 2.0
provides for the development and sharing of technologies matched to pedagogical needs. They
point out the pedagogical benefits that direct links to annotated primary source documents and an
integrated script editor provide for a teacher wishing to guide student-centered learning.
In addition, they suggest that the “niche audiences” (Bull et al., 2008, p. 282) of the web
and its “long tail” (p. 282) supported the development of free online software targeted to social
studies classrooms, providing students capacity to easily gather narration, images, documents,
and photographs in a server-side environment (Bull et al., 2008). The evolution of these tools
fulfills some key elements of TPACK, enabling teachers to identify and engage students with
manageable technology that fits the subject content, embeds sound pedagogical underpinnings,
and lends toward meaningful assessment.
The value of looking at scaffolds within TPACK. One of the concepts which truly
emerges from examining this intersecting area of all elements, is the need for a new kind of
teaching—one which places the teacher as a construction manager providing academic scaffolding
to help guide the design of student learning.
80
Students working with the Thinking Tags were especially inspired to engage in inquiry
even before they had internalized the biology language and concepts; researchers credit this to
“matching technologies to curriculum goals to help scaffold students’ inquiry activities” (Hug et
al., 2005, p. 467).
The authors by no means suggest that this match created an ideal environment for
supporting students at the highest levels of inquiry. In fact, they are explicit in detailing the
ways in which the Thinking Tags sometimes distracted students from taking explicit procedural
notes, or the ways in which sophistication was lacking in their investigation process. They
describe an understanding emerging from the research, that led to later iterations in which
increased scaffolding from teachers assisted the students in utilizing them to more sophisticated
levels (Hug et al., 2005).
The affordances for inquiry and the need for scaffolds were also front and center in the
analysis provided by researchers at Purdue and Arizona State, who examined the online worlds
of Whyville, WISE, River City, Knowledge Forum, and Biokids. Although the authors specify
the differences of task and organization within these five environments, they identify central
common threads that kept meaningful inquiry-based science at the center of the project,
including students’ participation in locating and using data and information, modeling solutions
that solve problems, and collaborating as a group of learners (Simons & Clark, 2005).
The researchers credit the five online environments with providing students both the
structural supports lent from the modeling and collaboration and the intentional scaffolding
supported by on-screen messaging, reflection notes, pull-down prompts, rules descriptions, user-
to-user messaging, data resource sharing, or resource angels (Simons & Clark, 2005). Ironically,
we can see the values of TPACK very much alive here too. The concepts of collaboration and
81
modeling speak to pedagogical approaches that engage meaningful opportunities with the
technology and the content. The more formal scaffolds embedded in these online environments
a kind of teacher assistance—albeit a virtual one. With the opportunity to be guided on
procedural elements and share evidence, users get layered support in exploring the tasks before
them.
Student participant in some research projects have defined and critique the value of the
supports built into online environments or software. The research described earlier around
Decision Point software usage (Saye & Brush, 2002) included a major increase in the structural
mandate of storyboarding—tripling or more students’ obligation to work with the software to
develop a formalized structural plan to their final multimedia project. Student subjects in the
research credited the value of the presentation preparation, although subject “student 4” (p. 90)
critiqued the limitations of the hard scaffolding embedded in the design of storyboards,
requesting more emergent “soft scaffolds” (p. 90) such as “timely” (p. 90) teacher review that
could be offered throughout the process.
The developers added or considered adding hard scaffolds over time to structure students’
exposure to the construction of historical arguments, the development of alternative
explanations, and the application of historical evidence into social problem solving; they
discovered “clearly there are limits to gains that may be achieved through hard scaffolds” (Saye
& Brush, 2002, p. 93) as they assisted with structuring the activities but did not engage the
highest-level engagement with students that is supported from emergent context-specific teacher
support. This understanding has tremendous implications on the design of technology-infused
classroom curriculum. The need for concrete structural design scaffolds that set up the project
requirements with clear guidance for students, and the ongoing mentorship needed from
82
instructors provides guidance in how everything from handouts, to project design, to assessment
be conducted.
Mixed-methods research was conducted during the first four months of 2010 at a public
university in Texas, to look at the perceived and actual usefulness of scaffolds embedded in an
online instructional technology course. As sixteen students in the graduate course participated in
Blackboard and studied various web 2.0 applications, the instructor/researcher documented the
students’ progress through a virtual observation of their learning artifacts, and incorporated three
surveys at different stages of the course (An, 2010).
The researcher drew on existing paradigms breaking scaffolding into the conceptual
structured through mandatory student completion of Project Plans and Progress Reports in
Wikispaces, the technological procedural resource scaffolding built into their online resource
notation requirements, and the strategic scaffolding offered through professorial feedback (An,
2010).
Although students in the project complimented the affordances that the technology
provided for “collaborative writing and editing” (An, 2010, pp. 730-731) they challenged the
premise that wikis were effective for decision-making and problem solving, instead turning to
synchronous communication software or face-to-face meetings if in geographic proximity.
The study also stresses the value that the students and instructor mutually felt through the
process described above-- as hard scaffolds engaged them in planning and communicating and
soft scaffolding redirected their learning activities.
An experimental design was used on a group of 72 pre-university students during six
lessons over two weeks of a history course in the Netherlands, with a goal of examining two
distinct types of argument design (diagram vs. list) scaffolds present in the Virtual Collaborative
83
Research Institute groupware to which they were randomly assigned in dyads. Students used the
technology to communicate, research, and develop argument charting for their major
performance-based assessment task- an essay that required they incorporate historical reasoning
and evidence based arguments in answering “whether the changes in the behaviour of Dutch
youth in the sixties were revolutionary or not” (Van Drie, Van Boxtel, Erkens, & Kanselaar,
2005, p. 28).
Through pre- and post- testing, a coded review of the groupware student chat, and the
artifacts of their work, the researchers looked amongst chat utterances to identify historical
reasoning and focus carefully on identifying when students “co-constructed their meaning on this
subject” (Van Drie et al., 2005, p. 32). Statistical analysis of the pre- and post- test on content-
knowledge and t testing of the documentation of co-elaborated historical reasoning did not show
significant differences between the conditions. The researchers suggest the explanation for these
findings can be seen in the documentation of how much collaborative communication focused on
figuring out the technology tools, in the way that the diagram condition did result in student
performance quality increases, and through the implication in chat that students do not challenge
each other’s ideas effectively enough to maximize co-elaboration (Van Drie et al., 2005).
Although from another nation, the research affirms certain concepts similar to the other
studies. The design of the online environment was built with conditions that sought to engage
hard scaffolds and in turn differences. Much as Saye and Brush’s earlier work reflects, there are
limits to the ways in which these hard design elements can work in isolation. The combination
of emergent influences is clearly suggested in these findings, as that it strongly represents the
idea that one can never plan for all eventualities. And it is precisely the power of communities
to mutually shape the individual that exists and the heart of history/social studies learning. The
84
challenge for students to define whether the behavior of their parents’ or grandparents’
generation was revolutionary in the 1960s, engages them in assessing lived through history in a
way that draws on the evidence of first-hand narratives, primary sources, and historical records.
Design for Research: Picking Scaffolds from the TPACK
Design-based research to support TPACK. TPACK offered a framework that
examines the intrinsically linked elements of technology, pedagogy, and content-knowledge.
Design-based research provided a nice parallel, as it brought together other intrinsically linked
elements— design, theory, problem, and naturalistic context. The approach in general applies
“rigorous methods” (Barab, 2014, p. 158) to develop theory as part of design-based solutions.
Resultantly, theories can be extracted from “principled accounts” (p. 158) and are successively
examined and refined throughout the process (p. 158). In this way it was particularly suited to
TPACK and curricular innovations and allowed for an iterative process for design and
refinement.
Researchers in 2004 conducted a web-based survey that gathered complete responses from
170 students from eight schools in the IDT Futures Group, seeking to have them explore their
understanding of the instructional design and technology field in which they were graduate
students. The open and closed ended questions engaged masters, doctoral, and specialist students
to explore the complexities and contradictions that represented their take on the field. The
researchers acknowledged that they “would be remiss” (Smith, Hessing, & Bichelmeyer, 2006, p.
26) not to integrate the voices of committed future leaders in their discipline and use these views
to identify areas of concern and devise interventions to address them.
When taking on an exploration of problem-based learning and technology in the classroom,
researchers have been presented with the challenge of finding a research method that is appropriate
85
to capture the complex activities going on in the classroom while supporting the researcher in
drawing some meaning. In addition, a commitment to student-centered progressive education
privileges successful learning by the way it which student participants are able to embrace it and
develop transferable knowledge.
In the 2003 Educational Researcher, a team of professors from Vanderbilt, Berkeley, and
the University of Texas offered their experience with the use of design experiments as a valuable
scientific method of researching educational practice. Their argument was that design research
involves “theory-oriented enterprises whose ‘theories’ do real work in practical educational
settings” (Cobb, Confrey, DiSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003, p. 13). In this way, design-based
research offered an approach to research that is very consistent with problem-based learning.
Problem-based learning, as described earlier, embeds the inquiry and learning by doing
advocated by Dewey while pushing students to maximize their self-directed learning. Design
science’s focus on purpose, intent, and interaction with the world (Mor & Winters, 2007)
establishes common ground with Dewey’s values around experiential learning. Learning by
design processes paralleled the observed participants’ learning by doing.
Instructors working in higher education and vocational education had found success with
implementing design-based research to enhance existing curricular designs and academic
programs. Instructors of the Australian Army’s Computer Based Learning Practitioners course
had been inspired to retool part of their course when post-evaluations revealed a shakiness and
discomfort among graduates around connecting with career opportunities. The instructors looked
at the Evaluating Educational Multimedia component that came at the end of the course, and
agreed to a design-based research process to “review, revise, and re-design” (Ashford-Rowe, 2008,
86
p. 23) content and “the summative assessment activity” (p. 23) to make both more predictive of
preparation for post-graduate career activities (2008).
The researchers credited their interpretation of the design-based process to Thomas Reeves,
and documented their usage of a four-step process that: engaged exploratory discussion among
thirteen educators, tutors, and designers associated with the course to develop notes on program
problems and possibilities for change; drew on similar research literature to define eight draft
principles which they refined among themselves and vetted with three authentic assessment
experts; delivered the course content in four 90-minute sessions which were observed, filmed, and
documented through researcher notes and participant surveys; and looked at students’ experience
with the new authentic assessment tasks to evaluate how they aligned to the draft design principles
and how they had succeeded in getting the desired results from students (Ashford-Rowe, 2008).
The documenting doctoral researcher expressed his belief that the design-based research
approach had been an effective choice for the project as it limited the instructors’ range of possible
interventions by highlighting particularly appropriate ones and integrating them into an active
course (Ashford-Rowe, 2008). It is a similar quality that others have extolled describing the way
“the design process iteratively generates solutions and then tests them against an array of
functional requirements” (Mor & Winters, 2007, p. 62) that maintain a rich picture of the problem
analysis. In these ways, the design-research process maintains a strong practical value in
supporting a process of enhancing instructional activities.
As pragmatic as the model may be for enhancing instructional experiences, design research
was credited as using its multilayered approach to develop theoretical meaning into the process.
“Design experiments are conducted to develop theories, not only to empirically tune ‘what works’;
they establish specific domain content, suggest students’ patterns of internalizing the content, and
87
analyze the content of student learning by reviewing artifacts generated through participants
practice experience” (Cobb et al., 2003, p. 9). It is these qualities that made design-based research
an effective method for exploring the theoretical strengths of instructional approaches like
problem-based learning and technology integration.
Some have critiqued those design-researchers who tried to use design-based research with
an eye toward proving cause-effect or superiority of method through the addition of quasi-
experimental designs and pre/post-test quantitative measures. Those who have espoused a deep
belief in design-based research have often clarified that the method is often used best when it has
embraced a context-rich approach that is much more targeted in its focus on specific interventions
that need customizing and improving.
The context rich approach focused on exploring existing “design patterns” (Mor & Winters,
2007, p. 71) offers configurations for tackling problems as a construct to examine, validate, and
refine approaches to layer a method for “ontological innovations.” (p. 71). These efforts to develop
knowledge and concepts within a domain have helped to maintain context and detail. The design
research process offered researchers the capability of checking the validity of their design tool by
examining whether it creates expected results when applied in practice as a problem-solution
(Andriessen, 2008).
By limiting its setting and scope, the design-based research has been “typically test-beds
for innovation” (Cobb et al., 2003, p. 10) that allowed researchers a greater level of drilling down
to “encounter relevant factors that contribute to the emergence of that form and to become aware
of their interrelations” (p. 10).
This limited scope the design-based research model seemed particularly apt given the
earlier described espousal of the Dewey, Montessori, and Sizer approaches to education. The
88
learning by doing inquiry based, and “less is more” (Coalition of Essential Schools, 2010, para. 2)
approaches synchronized well with the design-based research tact of actively engaging with
practice innovations in order to have gained depth-based knowledge about how fit the innovation
is for achieving its goals.
Beyond affording researchers specificity of focus, some researchers have lauded the way
in which design studies allow for flexibility in their selecting on what they wish to focus. This
model allowed researchers to select between using the process to refine educational designs “while
keeping the tools fixed” (Mor & Winters, 2007, p. 63) to explore the tools themselves staying
flexible with activities, or searching to round out the design and coherence of an activity system.
Like a powerful camera lens, design-research enabled the researchers to engage as practitioners
whose vision can be closely targeted to the tasks at hand.
Such flexibility has been helpful in embracing the exploratory nature of investigating
newer online, hardware, and software technologies in the classroom. When faced with limited
direct precedents, design-based research afforded an individual researcher an approach that could
be employed with their practice innovations over multiple investigations to develop a nuanced
understanding of everything from the technique, to the conceptual underpinnings, to the tool, or to
the system. In the case of this research that seeks to examine newly minted ideas in the Common
Core State Standards and in the 2009 Jenkins MacArthur white paper, the model offered an
appropriate way of picking up on the conceptual elements and further refining their application.
Design research can be viewed as a workplace approach that tackles a design problem
through the development of general solution concepts that can later be developed as reality-tested
specific solutions to specific situations—developing “relevant and rigorous” (Andriessen, 2008, p.
132) knowledge.
89
Andriessen saw a natural combination of the approach with action research and defines a
process of theorizing, agenda setting, designing, diagnosing, action planning, action taking,
evaluating, and specifying of learning (Andriessen, 2008, p. 129-130). Despite focusing on the
workplace environment, the lessons were incredibly relevant to investigations in a classroom. It
is due to the research approach’s traits that “innovative educational environments may be
simultaneously designed, taught, and studied” (Saye & Brush, 2002, p. 83). This firmly grounded
the research in a level of classroom practice that more firmly assured something has been learned
about the nature of one’s work efforts.
The approaches described above used individual cases and reflects on their value while
developing a collective consciousness. The result is a fostering of increased overall understanding.
Individual events interpreted in this manner create a dialogue or inter-textual communication in
which common logic develops and best practices emerge from repeated investigations. This
affords micro, mezzo, and macro levels of investigation in the classroom; the result was that
classroom teachers and school administrators gain usable, practical information about pedagogic
interventions.
Overview of This Research Project
The design implementation of the VOR unit. Much of the research literature reviewed
in this chapter highlighted the value of real-world civic participation, hands-on collaborative
learning experiences, and social media digital production. Most of the previous studies detailed
in these pages limit their scope to an individual element of technology, pedagogy, or content
knowledge.
This Voices of Representation Curriculum (VORC) research study applied TPACK
because it offers a triple-aspect view of the classroom. The TPACK model captured the interplay
90
of the digital and social media as technologies, applied into the high school social studies
classroom to ground problem-based learning pedagogical activities, with civic participation
highlighted as the content knowledge. The research in this study applied design-based research
techniques to further explore the new media literacies.
The research adopted this theoretical approach to acknowledge and honor the innovations
of curricular change that can occur when digital technologies and inquiry-driven pedagogy are
used to support increased student participation in the living embodiment or civic participation
elements of their subject matter. Put simply, this research was premised on John Dewey and
Theodore Sizer’s beliefs that students learn by doing in experiential opportunities connected to the
worlds beyond the school’s doors.
This was particularly poignant in the research as it contained the parallel process--high
school social studies students who have studied civic participation and activism having become
actual civic participants in historical information gathering by having interviewed community
activists. This research study took a design-based research approach to refine the hard and soft
cognitive scaffolds that supported these high school students as they developed a digital media kit
to capture their hands-on experiences with civic participation. The Voices of Representation
Curriculum (VORC) Project was proto-typed and its scaffolds developed and informed by the
researcher’s four years of action research between the completion of doctoral classes and the
approval of the research phase of the dissertation. The scaffold tools were shaped in part through
the researcher’s collaborative involvement in leading expeditionary learning activities across local
city council districts and across Washington D.C. for students’ exploration of national lobbying
and legislative processes.
91
During the winter 2014 academic semester, high school social studies teachers at the
research site employed the VORC cognitive scaffolds with their respective sections of students.
These hard and soft scaffolds are designed as support materials to enhance students’ capacity to
complete two successive iterations of digital media kits that captured the students’ learning process
and content knowledge.
The Voices of Representation Curriculum project capitalized on the experiential or
expeditionary learning values by providing technology-infusion that supported participant students
in making use of the residents of their city as a space for hands-on learning grounded in real-world
problems. The VORC project provided the opportunity for students to engage in acts of civic
participation both through their research and their digital/online presence. In doing so, it engaged
participant students to increase their civic participation in the worlds beyond their classroom—
around the whole school, among family and friends, around their community, and among
communities of practice.
This research placed its focus on the cognitive scaffolds which the researcher had designed
to support teachers and students in the application of the digital technologies to their classroom
course/project requirements.
Supported by the findings of the research detailed earlier in this chapter, the researcher had
developed both hard and soft scaffolds to clarify participatory expectations and applications for
student, teacher, and school community members alike. The research offered a rubric and teaching
materials on which the school community could build their understanding of the project. The first
iteration of student work turned in guided by these scaffolds, was analyzed with this rubric on an
aggregate level. Noticed areas of general weakness in student performance informed and resulted
in a second iteration of scaffold materials aimed at offering students more finely support.
92
The two hard scaffold items were a Student Work Assessment Rubric document and a
project assignment document. The researcher believed that these two documents provided the
participating teachers and students with a compelling vision of what civic engagement the project
requires, which technologies and online resources were requisite, and how they should have
approached the learning tasks. Consistent with the problem-based learning standards discussed in
this chapter, these two hard scaffolds surfaced students’ existing schema regarding these topics
and allowed them to explore tensions in their understandings by having a concrete touchstone.
Additionally, the clarification of project goals and learning supports helped students operate in the
zone of proximal development which Lev Vygotsky argued is the space in which the maximum
amount of new learning can occur. The scaffolds did so because they assisted in providing a
schema which made the large complex task that was previously unimaginable, imaginable. The
softer scaffolds added even richer supports for the student participants to make imaginable the very
specific requirements of a previously unimaginable task. Collectively, the scaffolds helped to
define skills/behaviors/practices/timeline to help students can aspire with guidance.
The four soft scaffolds were digital presentations available for the students via online
access. Students participating in the research were initially introduced to online spaces in which
these documents, videos, or files were hosted, which allowed access beyond class time. Each of
the four scaffolds addressed a general area of project functionality, using multiple pages to provide
students a range of documentation that they might find useful. This ensured that they were able to
access the material on their own schedule from either school or home.
Included among the scaffolds were ones that addressed: downloading video files from
your mobile device; uploading digital files to Google Drive; creating a page on Wikispaces; adding
hyperlinks on Wikispace pages; using commenting functions to post and respond to questions on
93
a Wikispaces page; organizing questions for oral history interviews; compiling research into
background context; and analyzing sources. The four scaffolds, and all the topics included within
them, were aligned to the new media literacies or standards by which the participants’ work will
be evaluated.
This research relied on providing scaffolds to support participants in exploring the use of
digital formats and tools, and in doing so, exposed the students and teachers to the actual
technologies that will be used as they develop their own high quality new media-kit content. In
this way, it sought to overcome the tendency described earlier in this chapter through which
general-purpose technologies failed to connect with subject-specific content because students have
no exposure to the usage of these technologies in practice. Participant students gained a first-hand
exposure to seeing how tools like Wikispaces can be used in the pursuit of social studies efforts to
document civic participation in government—instead of them first encountering it as a space to
paste encyclopedic content.
The VOR project research: The setting. The research site was a small public progressive
public school beginning its third decade, whose essential instructional pillars included project-
based/problem-based learning, digital technology integration, and the value of social and
emotional learning. Founded during the Annenberg Foundation’s 1990s era of support for the
creation of small schools, the school served as a model for at least five newer schools throughout
the general geographic region, developed during the 2000s Gates Foundation period of funding
new schools.
The school had long pursued social and emotional learning through a commitment to social
justice lens that has inspired its long-standing commitment to treat every student, family, and
faculty member as unique individuals. With an equally strong inclusion of social work principles
94
in its design, the school boasted an extensive approach to pupil personnel supports through which
faculty advisors, school administration, and partners in a local community-based social service
agency offer the school’s families hands-on support services.
The school began its existence with a diverse student body, representing relatively equal
percentages of African-American, Latino, Asian, and Caucasian students. During the course of
its twenty-one-year existence, it has lost much of its Asian population, with a commensurate
increase in its Caucasian population. Although the school began as a school in which the faculty
selected half of the student applicants and the city selected the rest randomly, the school had since
developed into a screened program which interviews applicants for admission to its sixth grade
with the expectation they will attend all seven years. Applicants to the school were interviewed
by a collective team of parents and faculty who searched for an academically heterogeneous
population of students interested in the school’s central pillars.
The researcher was part of the founding team that develop the research-site school during
its early years, and had served as a teacher and then an administrator before leaving the school to
found and develop a new public school site that further explored the principles of problem-based
learning, technology, and social and emotional learning in a different locality within the large
district.
The prototyped scaffolds used in this research were informed by the researcher’s informal
action research performed in years past when previously working at the research site. That work,
not detailed in this dissertation, shaped the professional sensibilities of the research and suggested
beneficial practices to support teacher pedagogy and student learning goals. That action research
had taken place in a 10th grade humanities combined social studies/English classroom with
teachers who were not involved participants in this research.
95
The research site was selected as it served as an effective test-bench for the activity due to
two factors— alignment of instruction and establishment of community. The research site was a
school whose chief premises aligned with elements that the researcher valued as key to classroom
experiences. The researcher felt this also reduced the possibility that egregious practice
differences would crop up among the teacher participants during the research. The similarity of
values was helpful and not an interference as the students themselves were not a unit of analysis.
The site benefitted the product testing nature of the design research, as participants embodied the
type of users that might first adopt the product.
The school had already developed a community culture and an environment of learning
and rigor. The school’s entire curricular approach has been documented at annual school reviews
as cohesive and well developed. The school had a successful record of employing school-designed
or externally designed curricular innovations. The serious nature of academics at this school
helped to ensure that interaction with the VORC project were not likely to be jeopardized by
faculty or student fears of academic innovation or activities within the school culture.
The research site school espoused customized Habits of Mind to encourage academic risk
taking, critical thinking, and forming intellectual connections. The school replaced the typical 9th
and 10th grade social studies global history survey-course with courses that look at how
governments have established themselves in different times and places, and the ways in which
ongoing struggles to define and establish human rights have led to change. The research site had
faculty who had developed or revised original courses to highlight a series of thematic explorations
of core social studies disciplinary elements, rather than to cover specific content—evident of the
practices advocated by the Coalition of Essential schools- of which it is a member.
96
The research site’s 9th grade Humanities course, merging social studies and English in a
double period daily, focused on governments and social justice while its 10th grade Humanities
course explored global conflicts through the lens of the United Nation’s 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, examining specific periods and places.
The research site’s second semester of the 10th grade Humanities course, explores socio-
economic wealth and power and human rights in America. The social studies content involved
an in-depth exploration of the city council districts and engaged students in ethnographic studies
of the neighborhoods. Students were required to participate in a process that paralleled the city
council discretionary funding application process to generate understanding of how neighborhood
improvement projects are funded. As the unit moved on, students collaborated in self-created
teams around a self-chosen topic of inquiry on national issues affecting human rights. In the past
at this school, these topics had tended to focus on issues like gun control, mental health legislation,
euthanasia, etc.
As part of these teams, students engaged in first-hand research with national lobbying
organizations in their city and in Washington D.C. The course culminated with the entire grade
visiting Washington, D.C. and then spending several weeks developing their own media
plan/media kit to successful draw an audience’s attention to propose legislative/policy changes or
needs.
The research site’s 11th grade social studies curriculum engaged students in an exploration
of American History from the revolutionary war period until the progressive era. Also at this point
in the academic sequence, the students were required to develop a 10-15 page annotated thesis
paper which they were required to defend before a committee of teachers, peers, and parents. The
research site’s 12th grade course for most of the last decade had engaged students in exploring lived
97
through history by investigating the civil rights era heavily through documentary footage, primary
source materials, and interviews. Intermittently, the course required students to speak to an activist
who had worked around issues relevant to the civil rights of women, the LBGT community, and
people of color.
The Voice of Representation Curriculum involved in this research project offered the
teachers and students in the 12th grade a curricular project that paired with their existing content.
The focus on civic engagement in the VORC resonated with the goals helping students understand
history through this lived through perspective.
The scaffolds in the Voices of Representation project scaffolds were believed by the
researcher to be the key element to support students’ success with meeting project requirements
by delineating how students could generate authentic civic participation through digital tools and
then use these tools to capture the interactions. The research employed the design-based research
strategy to refine a set of hard scaffold elements (rubrics and project sheets) and soft scaffold
elements (best practice and how to documents). The research site teachers were asked to follow
the VORC assignment approach—asking students to complete two successive digital content
portfolios of their thoughts, research, feelings, and communication around their chosen topic of
inquiry.
The research proposed that the student work product resulting from the first assignment
and prototyped scaffolds be analyzed immediately after submission to support a refinement of the
scaffolds. The student work was analyzed in the aggregate for strengths and weakness trends,
rather than examining individual changes in students. The refined scaffolds were revised
immediately to support students through the second assignment. At the completion of the second
assignment, the researcher examined the final aggregate product of work and interviewed teacher
98
participants to add their perception of the scaffolds’ value in supporting the development of the
student work.
The VOR design method and timeline. This research proposed a timeline that began
with the implementation of a beta version of the cognitive scaffolds to the 12th grade history class
during the late part of the fall 2014 semester. The VORC project unit was integrated into the 12th
grade course after students had participated in a study of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights issues
and their parallels in contemporary America. Students’ study of these change initiatives was set
to be complemented by VORC asking them to engage in two phases of interviewing people about
contemporary history. Students were asked to engage in transmedia communication—capturing
these civic engagement interactions in digital and social media.
The VORC project unit incorporated the iterative media capture process as a technique that
offers activities to develop the students’ reflective understanding of what goes into creating
political and social change. The proposed scope was to access between 40 and 60 students in the
school site’s twelfth grade. After the initial debut of the scaffolds in late December 2014, a brief
period was proposed during which a first iteration of the beta Voices of Representation scaffolds
was introduced, tweaked into a 1.5 generation, and refined into a second iteration of scaffolds.
The details of this process are in Chapter 4.
Although online surveys at several phases and a post-participation optional student
interview were part of an originally approved plan to collect information on students’ perceptions
and beliefs regarding their skill with digital tools, both were meant to be confirmatory rather than
informing scaffold revision. Neither was ultimately conducted.
An aggregate analysis of the student work product was proposed to be in the middle of the
process during a one to two-week period, with teacher participants using the Voices of
99
Representation Student Work Assessment Rubric (VOR-SWAR). This aggregate analysis of the
initial portfolio of student work, an interim assessment, was meant to identify areas where the
student learning products fell short of meeting the Common Core State Standards and Jenkins
defined new-media literacies that were described in chapters 1 and 2. This information provided
the researcher with the information needed to revise scaffolds for students use during the end of
January.
This information from the teachers’ analysis of student work was proposed to help the
research critically examine the beta hard and soft scaffolds and appropriately revise and enhance
them to offer better curricular guidance towards students’ digital documentation of their authentic
civic participation.
Conclusion
The TPACK perspective engages educators to consider the intersection of technology,
pedagogy, and content knowledge. Design-based activities in this research project were proposed
to capture a robust picture of the implementation process when high school history teachers apply
technological tools to solve real-world civic interactions.
The design-based research was proposed to support the development of working theory as
to the alignment needs and shifts around the three TPACK elements described above. The use of
a wiki, presentation, podcast, or video content, as described in the research studies documented in
this chapter, often struggle due to mismatched use of general-purpose technologies with subject-
specific content. This research sought to showcase how general-purpose tools like Wikis can be
more directly paired with discipline-specific/content-specific tasks through guided scaffolding.
100
The design-based approach sought to offer an exploration of the cognitive scaffolds and
their most effective format to support alignment of commonplace technologies and subject-
content.
The research methodologies were employed to generate a deeper analysis of best practices
around hard and soft scaffolds to support student achievement, and in turn to inform future
development of assignment sheets, rubrics, and handouts that maximize civic engagement.
A collection of research has recognized the direct value of civic engagement among
adolescents-- especially when speaking to their ability to create change in the world or even to
better understand and participate within their school community. One can, however, understand
the concept of participatory culture described in the first chapter in a richer way by locating it in
the intersection of civic engagement and social media.
Figure 3. TPACK Lens for tech, PBL, civic participation intersection.
Theorists like Henry Jenkins have consistently urged people to look at the way in which
adolescents are activated toward greater levels of civic participation by their experiences in the
101
virtual world with its low barriers to participation. Jenkins valued social media and participatory
cultures for its ability to spur adolescents to greater levels of civic engagement.
This VORC project research focused on providing the supports needed to harness the
power of these online tools to support the forms of civic participation of which Jenkins and the
Common Core suggest are warranted in the contemporary classroom.
Research efforts like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on
Digital Media and Learning have funded investigations into the civic life of adolescents and
digital media and brought the connections between teaching, technology, and subject-content
into clearer view. When Jenkins’ team spoke of transmedia navigation, collective intelligence,
and networking, they also addressed very clear examples of how these skills might look in an
educational setting. The Common Core State Standards asked for the clear development of new
capacities in students to conduct disciplined research and engage in appropriate digital outputs.
TPACK offered this researcher a unified way of examining how such skills can be best
developed in the secondary classroom setting— especially when applied to problem-based
inquiry activities. A research of the literature suggested that students and teachers get the most
out of mobile technologies, new media literacies, and inquiry-based methods when appropriate
hard and soft cognitive scaffolds are in place. This VORC project research, as described in
chapter 3, was proposed because it allowed a process-oriented procedure to further define the
needs and refine best practices support documents associated with supporting students through
such curricular units.
Chapter 3: The Methodology
Overview of the Method
The focus of the research. Chapter one showcased how the participatory cultures of the
online world bring youth into a range of very academic pursuits that offer challenge and intrigue.
The real world has made writers and gamers, politicians and media producers of teens by activating
their civic participation. However, school settings often have not.
The second chapter weighed the challenges of innovating classroom teaching, especially
as pertains to technology and hands-on learning strategies. Two key concepts that emerged in
the literature were the vision of TPACK as a means engaging in a reflective professional
development practice and scaffolds as pedagogical technique for supporting students through
complex classroom innovations. A range of the literature extols TPACK to develop a rich
description of complex classroom innovations. Within that literature, select research (An, 2010;
Hug et al., 2005; Saye & Brush, 2002; Simmons & Clark, 2005; Stevens & Brown, 2011; Swan
& Hofer, 2011) held up cognitive scaffolds as a key to supporting students through such
innovations; hard scaffolds of assignments and rubrics were suggested to guide students’
activities and soft scaffolds of training and support documents are advised for providing ongoing
touchstones.
The methodology used in this research project applied design-based research as a means
of beta testing and then refining hard and soft scaffolds that the researcher believes will serve as
an ongoing curricular tool to support the infusion of technology into secondary classrooms that
value problem-based learning.
The Voices of Representation project offered a technology-infusion unit for the teacher to
embed in relevant social studies content. Although in the case of this research it was embedded
102
103
within a unit specifically on local oral history collecting, the researcher presents a unit that could
embed in any social studies content that asks for civic involvement activities with residents,
activists, or governmental officials beyond the school’s doors.
To this end, the Voices of Representation project defined for participant teachers and
students an approach to develop a portfolio of information gathering through oral histories—a
core social studies technique that can be applied to any specific historical topics. The VORC
unit offered a rubric, an assignment breakdown, and how to scaffolds which the course’s teachers
can use as both a planning tool and a teaching tool.
The research site’s receptive administrative and pedagogical team’s commitment to
progressive education provided an ideal open laboratory to apply TPACK as a lens to better
understand the classroom innovations that occur during design-based activities. The VORC unit
engages students in developing a new media presence as a product of disciplined research into
two contemporary historical events. Students were provided cognitive scaffolds to support their
development of digital resources that will be shared beyond the classroom. The unit engaged
students to communicate with resources outside the classroom in an effort to conduct disciplined
research. The unit asked students to integrate the research activities the teacher is assigning into
forms of digital output that offers students the expectation to use social media and digital tools to
practice inspiring social documentary. It embraced the contention of researchers like Henry
Jenkins who see the digital tools as closely connected to increased civic participation among
young adults.
Embedded in the unit was scaffolding to support students in cognitively conceiving of
what goes into creating a high-quality product and practicing the required skills in an authentic
way that takes them beyond the classroom doors. Hard scaffolds, such as the project rubric and
104
unit plans, provided students with a clear vision of what academic behaviors are expected of
them and how they should engage in participatory activities. Soft scaffolds, such as training
videos and best practice handouts, offered students a very practical understanding of the digital
and technical skills that will support them in this journey.
The research had not analyzed individual students’ development or look for causal or
association relationships. The research focused on the curriculum and used a design-based process
to fine-tune the curriculum. The researcher proposed but then removed an anonymous online
survey on self-perceptions regarding academic uses of technology for student participants from
the process to restrict the focus to the design improvement of the scaffolds.
As described earlier on page 110 and 111, students were introduced to scaffolds in late
December 2014 that defined and supported two sets of project requirements—due respectively in
early/mid-January and at the end of January. The first iteration of the scaffolds provided students
support around the technological tasks and social studies writing tasks that teachers were
evaluating. After teachers presented the reviewer with the student work as assessed using his
rubric, the researcher noted aggregate trends of student academic struggle. A second iteration of
scaffolds was issued digitally within the week, providing students the additional supports to meet
the master standards espoused on the rubric.
This research project sought to better understand pedagogical and curricular techniques
that enhanced civic participation among high school students. Problem-based learning, detailed
in the second chapter, has provided higher education and K-12 students a learning by doing
approach to build students’ rich connections with authentic tasks. For this researcher, the
problem-based challenge of having to conduct oral history interviews in the larger community
105
provided students a curricular model that required students to extend their academic work
beyond the school’s doors.
Likewise, social media and technology tools provided adolescents the opportunity to embody
their civic participation in a digital form that can be shared and promoted on a global level.
Evidence from Henry Jenkins’ 2006 book Convergence Culture and 2009 MacArthur
White Paper along with the Pew Research Institute presented in the last two chapters showcase
the powerful connection that technology affords teens to share in naturalistic learning
communities shaped by affinity and practice. Social media and ubiquitous technology tools
applied to the social studies classrooms in this research project supported students in engaging
with democratic processes in the world outside the school’s walls.
Specifically, this research focused on digital tools— the integration of multimedia
software and web-based technologies to support student’s disciplined social studies work and
knowledge. The research recognized that despite the prevalence of options to edit movies, share
Wiki content, tweet, share Facebook likes, or design brochures and web pages, that teachers do
not necessarily have a clear sense of best practices to maximize students’ use of these. As
discussed in Chapter 2, it is often the general nature of these tools that contributes to educators’
and students’ muddled sense of how they are to be integrated into the process of subject-content
learning. For example, classroom teachers at various grade levels have engaged students to build
a wiki to showcase learning on a book, a research activity, or a portfolio of their own work with
students muddling through the activity contributing little.
Past research has told us that students and their teachers may not be clear how individual
and communal expectations are to play out. The cognitive scaffolds beta tested and revised
during this research process aimed to offer curricular assistance to bridge that gap. This research
106
project used a curricular unit with an Assignment document and a Student Work Assessment
Rubric as tools that possess, in and of themselves, a designed or built-in pedagogy which he
believed would support a clearer vision for the road to work completion on the scale and scope
intended. Likewise, the research entered into the research with the premise that the four soft
scaffolds would provide students clarity and standards around expected work output.
This research applied a design-based research methodology to refine a proto-typed civic
participation project curriculum that develops students’ new media literacy through technology
tools. Put simply, even if past research predicts that hard and soft scaffolds are important, this
researcher felt the need to use an iterative design process to develop a deeper understanding of
the classroom elements that are maximally effective for the scaffolding process.
The selection of a site. Previous experience working with an long-standing innovative
public school led the researcher to investigate it as a potential site. Given the school’s pedagogical
leanings, performance-based assessment, non-mobile student population, and successful past
technology integration efforts, the researcher felt is was great candidate as a research site for
curricular design-research. Part of effective research-practice partnerships is the alignment
mission. The University of Michigan/MIT Media Lab Artemis/Thinking Tags (Hug et al., 2005)
research and the Learning by Design earth and physical science research (Kolodner et al., 2003),
detailed in the survey of the literature, showcase the innovative design-based research activities
that can happen when educators and researchers partner.
As this research project focused on bringing together problem-based learning,
technology, and social studies within a design-based experiment, there are a limited set of public
secondary school settings that align in values and resources orientation. The block funding
provisions of the United States’ Congress 2001 Elementary and Secondary Education Act
107
nicknamed No Child Left Behind and its policies have dominated many school districts during
the first decade of the twenty first century, leaving standardized test preparation as dominant
classroom presence. Despite a recent shift toward a Common Core State Standards aligned
performance testing, many high schools have still not fully turn-keyed professional development
and elaborated and implemented the recommended changes. As a result, school districts have
remained leery of focusing resources in areas other than preparing students for state-level
testing— old or transitional.
That said, this research project needed to narrow down its selection to a school site that
already had a compelling commitment to learning innovations— prizing the value of students’
experiential learning by doing. The Coalition of Essential Schools has long contained a wide-
berth of schools with these value systems. Drawing on the intellectual principles of John Dewey
and Theodore Sizer, Coalition schools have ascribed to 10 Common Principles (Coalition of
Essential Schools, 2010) customized by the school’s design team and implemented as best
practices. This researcher had the benefit of working for many years at a Coalition school, one
that sits as part of a first generation of small schools within its city.
That school was identified and proposed to the local department of education’s
Institutional Review Board as a research site. The school site has drawn its admissions from all
areas of the school district, screening all candidates. Based on its lack of specific bilingual or
dual-language programming, the school has traditionally had almost no English Language
Learners population. With approximately 10% of students having an Individualized Education
Plan, it has offered an approach to special education and IEP needs consistent with the state’s
option of multiple periods per day of special education support to empower students in a
mainstreamed heterogeneous non-tracked classroom.
108
The school possessed curricular freedoms due to its long-term participation in a state
recognized waiver to allow a performance-based assessment approach. It participated in this
waiver as part of a district-sized collaborative of schools. The waiver has allowed the school to
maintain the freedom to develop original curricula aimed at supporting students through the
critical thinking, the elaborated writing, and the sustained research involved in these tasks. The
school’s performance-based assessment tasks have been reviewed annually from their cohort of
schools to establish the inter-rater reliability of this authentic assessment approach to the state.
The research value of design based interventions. As detailed in the previous chapter,
design-based research offered this research a model for the investigation of classroom phenomenon
that retains robust information while seeking to connect specific observed practices to a more
generalized framework. Such a model has allowed researchers to progressively develop
innovations in great detail and then share with others in a way that allows them to “recontextualize
the theory-in-context with respect to their local particulars” (Barab, 2014, pp. 156-157).
In this research project, there was tremendous value in using the method to pilot an
approach to increasing students’ civic engagement around their subject content by bringing hard
scaffolds and soft scaffolds into the classroom. The design-based research process afforded the
opportunity for the classroom to serve as a test-bench at which these techniques can be
implemented and efficiently refined into a more final form. Within the two month period of the
research, a group of just over 40 students and their two participating teachers generated
meaningful qualitative data that supported the refining of the research project’s scaffolds.
The distinction between research and regular classroom activities. At the research site,
the school and its teachers had set an existing goal to focus their curriculum around increased civic
participation, to develop students’ critical understanding of the complex local and global social
109
justice issues and to better understand their individual role in creating change from the local level
to the national or international level.
The Voices of Representation Curriculum (VORC) project offered the school and two
teachers a social studies unit that could be integrated into any class. The research site’s existing
high school curriculum supported several hands-on activities: a visitation to city council
members, a collaborative design process of proposed funding documents for review by former
city council staff, student-directed exploration of national lobbying issues and organizations, a
visit to Washington D.C. to meet with legislators and lobbyists, and interviews with local
activists around issues of civil liberty and rights.
The VORC integrated with such a model, provided an additional digital portfolio
element, through which students were guided to capture their research and their personal
understanding of the material in a socially shareable way. The VORC provides enhanced
teaching and scaffolding of relevant social studies skills in a manner that enhances the course,
without necessitating teachers to alter the way in which they are teaching. It provides a stand-
alone enhancement that models best practices without overtaking the course.
Given the nature of assessment at the school, it was expected that after this VORC unit is
complete, students would likely present their findings in a face-to-face manner. The VORC
provided an approach consistent with the common social studies expectations that teachers
require of high school students—the ability to highlight sociological, political, economic,
cultural, and spatial impacts. The VORC utilized the Social, Political, Economic, Cultural,
Spatial (SPECS) acronym and related imagery of lenses to support students’ memorization and
integration of these contextualizing skills.
110
The VOR project and scaffolds were anticipated to serve as a bridge between the course’s
initial explorations into civil rights battles and the course’s end-goals of students going beyond
the building to interview activists who have lived through the fights for social change.
The Research Design- Cycles of Investigation
As indicated in Chapter 2, this research data-collection process was designed to occur
during the late fall 2014 semester. This process was designed to allow for there to be two
iterations of the Voices of Representation curriculum project scaffolds, with opportunities for
analysis as captured in the figure below.
The first iteration. This research was originally scheduled to start its interaction with
students in September or November 2014. This timeline was ultimately adjusted to allow for
teacher participants availability to engage in the research. Consent matters were scheduled to be
conducted at the site during November 2014 and early December. Scaffolds from the Voices of
Figure 4. VOR research cycles of investigation overview.
Representation Curriculum were provided to participating faculty and students in December. It
was proposed that students would make use of these curricular hard and soft scaffolds during
December, submitting their portfolio by early January of new media content specified in the hard
scaffolds, and embodying practices clarified in the soft scaffolds. The project scaffolds
requested students to submit this work for teacher evaluation digitally. The researcher proposed
providing the participating teachers with the VOR-Student Work Assessment Rubric and making
•November/Dece
mber
•Scaffolds
distributed to
participants
I
from
•Students work
from late
December to 2nd
Week Jan
•Students Submit
Portfolio
1 I
S
to
•2nd iteration
scaffolds
provided
•students submit
final work
T
Final edits on
scaffold enhances
curricular product
F stu
review
& -teacher
111
them familiar with its usage. The teachers were asked to evaluate the student work using this
rubric and provide filled out rubric sheets to the researcher. This process was aimed hat having
the teachers evaluate the degree to which each student portfolio embodied the mastery
performance criteria of the Common Core State Standards and Jenkins literacy skills identified in
the earlier chapters.
The Voices of Representation Student Work Assessment Rubric (VOR-SWAR) provided
a document scheduled to be used twice during this process, to assess the student work product
submitted as supported by the iteration of the scaffolds. This rubric, attached in Appendix A,
provided a consistent assessment tool to examine the student work for evidence of students
demonstrating the CCSS/Jenkins skills.
Initial analysis and the second iteration. In January, the teachers evaluating student
work having shared the rubric cover sheets, stripped of individual identity, would thereby be
providing the researcher with the opportunity to explore aggregate descriptive data that captures
the whole grade’s relative success in meeting the 10 dimensions of the VOR-SWAR— built
specifically around select Common Core and Jenkins standards relevant to the research. Noting
these trends, it was proposed that the researcher would modify these scaffolds and provide these
to students in mid-January, to enhance students’ capacity to demonstrate these skills in their
second set of portfolio content.
It was anticipated that a thoughtful analysis and iterative revision process around the
cognitive scaffolds would have resulted in student gains around increased civic participation,
further implementation of digital technologies, and more detailed meta-cognition around
problem solving and exploration of content knowledge.
112
Students’ submissions of their VOR Portfolio v 2.0 at the end of January 2015 was
anticipated to provide the researcher final information which along with a post-research teacher
participant interview, could inform final adjustments in the scaffolds.
In the spirit of design-based research, it was anticipated that the details of this process
would provide the qualitative data to inform chapter four of this document, thereby capturing
details that can be generalized toward developing a theory.
The Scaffolds: Their Function, Their Philosophical Underpinnings, and their Application
In Data Collection
The scaffolds being refined. This research project focused on developing more effective
and refined curricular scaffolds to support students through a process of increased civic
participation in their high school content area. To do this, a design-based process supported the
researcher in revising these changeable elements— namely the scaffolds themselves.
There were two hard scaffolds that were utilized across iterations, a VOR Student Work
Assessment Rubric and an Assignment sheet. The researcher put forth the premise based on the
research stated in chapter two that giving students access to these documents, provided them the
cognitive and curricular scaffolds that allow them to gain a much clearer picture of the specific
expectations that are being asked of them.
The VOR Student Work Assessment Rubric provides a breakdown of specific expected
skills that it is hoped that students can actively demonstrate in their project portfolio. The VOR
Assignment Sheet provided a timeline and description of the structural elements expected in the
assignment. These tools provided teachers, students, and parents a visible thought space to shape
clear expectations about the skills and expected content of that portion of the course. These
documents were anticipated to clarify the standards by which the student work would be judged.
113
The four soft scaffolds represent an effort to support students’ increased comfort and
access to social media by engaging them at once in two key affordances of social media. First,
the technologies allow students to view digital content that provides how to explanations of what
they are in turn expected to do themselves. Second, the experience of viewing and learning
through online resources that are targeted for them instructionally models the concept of using
the social media medium for just such effect with the public beyond the school’s walls.
As explored in chapter two of this document on page 97, the four soft scaffolds offered a
detailed set of how-to modeling—providing students tutelage on topics like uploading and
downloading their work, embedding and linking materials onto original Wikispace pages,
conducting oral history interviews following best practices, and providing a range of analysis and
commentary on the collective efforts to conduct interviews. These segments made use of digital
online media tools and were available for the student to use both during class time and at their
own leisure—to repeatedly take in the tools of support from their teachers and technology
specialists.
Unlike the hard scaffolds’ presentation of project boundaries, the soft scaffolds were
designed to offer an exemplar through providing direct guidance to students as to the steps
involved in generating a successful portfolio product. The soft scaffolds were meant to portray
what elements of the successful product will look and sound like.
The researcher believed that these soft scaffolds provide an important complement to the
definitions and expectations offered by hard scaffolds. The researcher anticipated the design-
based format of the research would highlight the ways in which these scaffolds hold together as a
unit. The analysis of student work by rubric as an aggregate collection was proposed to help the
researcher determine collective areas of strength or weakness in students’ end-product, when
114
relying on the scaffolds to establish expectations. This researcher looked at these features under
the premise that such curricular success would represent a model of effective alignment of
technology, pedagogical techniques, and content knowledge through the scaffolds.
The rubric used to assess student work and inform scaffold revision. As described in
both chapter two and this chapter, design-based research activities were used to assess student
work, and in doing so, help the researcher to refine the Voices of Representation Curriculum
(VORC) scaffolds to provide students more effective guidance.
The desired goal of this project and these scaffolds was to support participants in
achieving increased civic participation and in effectively using technological and pedagogical
tools in the course. The scaffolds were the changeable element of the research project— and
they were set to be refined after the researcher reviews and analyzes participants’ content and
feedback. Chapter 1 and 2 respectively offered details about Common Core and Jenkins
standards that are particularly relevant as elements of a new media literacy to help students
transverse the narrative environment of social media.
To narrow the total possible collection of literacy skills that might be analyzed during this
research, the ten specific dimensions discussed earlier were selected by the researcher and
synthesized into a single rubric to analyze student work from two distinct practice-based
sources— the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s English Language Arts Reading,
Writing, and Social Studies, Sciences, and Technical Subjects standards (NGA, CCSSO 2010)
and the MacArthur Foundation White Paper “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory
Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” (Jenkins et al., 2009).
The former source has been a nationally recognized anchor document that has become
the guiding new curricular standards in almost every state in the nation as of 2013. The latter
115
document represented the work of Henry Jenkins and a team of researchers, drawing on the
collective range of comparative media, sociological, and educational technology research to
define an exploratory set of 21st century new media literacies.
The common core state standards selected describe a focus around a demonstrating a
skill-set in which adolescents show capacity to understand the affordances and credibility of
online resources, conduct independent research tasks, develop elaborated written and digital
resources that document their findings, and communicate these findings across media in a
compelling manner.
The Voices of Representation Student Work Assessment Rubric specifically focused on
the ten dimensions detailed earlier, drawing its new media literacies, research, analysis, and
presentation skills from the Common Core State Standards (NGA, CCSSO, 2010) and Henry
Jenkins MacArthur White Paper (Jenkins, 2009). The researcher selected three dimensions from
Jenkins that address student performance elements of civic participation, disciplined problem-
based inquiry, and networked technological infusion to support subject-content.
The researcher selected seven Common Core State Standards that represent what
amounts to the closest vision that the United States currently has on the 9th and 10th grade anchor
skills that bring together the implementation of technology for researching and sharing relevant
social studies policy analysis, thesis development, and position paper skills with the requisite
English language arts skills of disciplined research and analytic writing.
The three Jenkins dimensions selected represent the new media literacies which most
speak to adolescents’ abilities to navigate the information superhighway efficiently, to build
virtual and actual connections through sustained community-based practices, and to construct
their own meaning and narrative in the world by developing hands-on content which tells its
116
story through multiple media. In this way the Jenkins elaborated skills-sets complement the
Common Core standards selected as evidence of students’ ability to meet all of the technological,
pedagogical, and content knowledge ideals suited for this investigation.
The values embedded in the rubrics and scaffold revision. For the purposes of this
research, there were 10 dimensions given key status by their placement on the VOR project rubrics
used to guide and analyze the hard and soft scaffolds. These 10 dimensions were cultivated from
the Common Core and MacArthur White paper described above. Selected from much longer
documents, these ten dimensions are by no means the only items that could have been chosen.
These items were selected as they represent a range of new media literacies that showcase a
student’s ability to communicate across digital media— researching, analyzing, and sharing their
findings in a civic minded manner. Enclosed below, is a researcher code book to offer a bolded
brief code name that summarizes the dimension from it’s larger description offered here and in the
earlier chapters. These shorter bold names and brief descriptions will be used on rubrics and
scaffold documents rather than the more elaborated description.
These ten dimensions were summarized as:
• CCSS A- Sustained Research to Synthesize an Answer to a Question or Problem
• CCSS B- Analyzing the Political, Social, or Economic Aspects of History/Social
Science
• CCSS C- Comparing & Contrasting Multiple Primary and Secondary Source
Treatments
• CCSS D- Developing Discipline-Appropriate Claims and Counter Claims with
Appropriate/Applicable Use of Formatting, Graphics, and Multimedia
117
• CCSS E- Write Informative/Explanatory Texts Capturing Historical, Scientific, or
Technical Processes with Appropriate/Applicable Use of Formatting, Graphics, and
Multimedia
• CCSS F- Using technology and the Internet to Dynamically Produce, Publish, Share
and Display Information
• CCSS G- Gathering Relevant Authoritative Print and Digital Sources Effectively,
Assessing their Usefulness, and Integrating without Plagiarizing
• Jenkins A- Collective Intelligence
• Jenkins B- Transmedia Navigation
• Jenkins C- Networking
These ten dimensions lent a specific operational grounding to the exploration of product
change. It was believed that the explicitness of these scaffolds in their appearance on hard
scaffold and skill-training in the soft scaffolds will support their skills being a more transparent
academic element to teachers, students, and parents— a more intentional part of the curricular
process. This premise drew from the chapter 2 research items that spoke to the needed
consideration of the technological pedagogical dimensions— the recognition of the changes in
teaching approach that grow out of the integration technology.
These dimensions were believed to allow for an operational interpretation of the student
work documents, looking for specific performance-based evidence. In this way they sought to
assist in the alignment of the student work product expectations with the mission and vision of
civic-minded engagement, progressive inquiry-based learning techniques, and constructionist
technology interventions. In addition, they offered specific and evidence-based skills about
which the researcher may examine student work and question teacher participants. The Voices
118
of Representation Student Assessment Rubric used to evaluate student work broke down a
differential assessment of each dimension. A sample of this rubric is contained in Appendix A
of this document. The rubric’s format was impacted on by the period of time described earlier as
a period of action research previously completed at the research site.
Most specifically, the research site uses a model of grading that eschews letter or number
grades. Teachers at the location grade students by the degree to which a student has or has not
met standards associated with the course. To be applicable to this model, the rubric identified
both mastery standards which are being evaluated on that row and then provided a bulleted
description of what might constitute each grading level. Although the rubric does not include an
interface to traditional grading, it could easily be connected to a more traditional A-F grading
system as well based on the use of 5 gradients, provided the school in question supported the use
of rubrics.
The operational definitions of the ten dimensions. The researcher saw operational
definitions as important to the teacher analysis, the consent process, and the research itself, that
there be established definitions. Student work deliverables were to be analyzed by the teachers
and researcher using the VOR-SWAR rubric at midpoint and endpoint of the research process
across the dimensions described below.
For the dimension of CCSS A: Sustained Research to Synthesize an Answer to a
Question or Problem (NGA, CCSSO, 2010) the researcher identified that:
• Students develop and pose essential questions regarding their real-world topic of
inquiry;
• Students collect their research in digital form in efficient and readily available ways
with proper annotation;
119
• Students record a meta-cognitive review of their research steps and thought process
during research.
For the dimension of CCSS B: Analyzing the Political, Social, or Economic Aspects of
History/Social Science (NGA, CCSSO, 2010) the researcher identified that:
• Students document their analysis of readings by sharing their understandings of the
SPECS (social, political, economic, cultural, and spatial/geographic) conflicts/policy
issues present in these sources;
• Students elaborate on SPECS elements by labeling and explaining key stakeholders,
concepts, and underpinnings;
• Students use proper social science phrases to communicate SPECS conflicts and
policy issues.
For the dimension of CCSS C: Comparing & Contrasting Multiple Primary and
Secondary Source Treatments (NGA, CCSSO, 2010) the researcher identified that:
• Students discern and describe the positions/perspective that their primary and
secondary sources take toward their content;
• Students contrasting sources based on potential bias, primary or secondary status, and
the context through which the sources were obtained;
• Students outreaching to additional sources, including subjects involved in the social
and policy activities, if possible, to compare and contrast the information of written
documents and lived through materials.
For the dimension of CCSS D: Developing Discipline-Appropriate Claims and Counter
Claims with Appropriate/Applicable Use of Formatting, Graphics, and Multimedia (NGA,
CCSSO, 2010) the researcher identified that:
120
• Students include a thesis argument that is comprised of three cohesive assertions;
• Students address a counter-argument grounded in evidence which they then
appropriately dismiss through applying logic;
• Students enhance the logical chain of the argument through selective and creative use
of formatting, graphics, and media.
For the dimension of CCSS E: Write Informative/Explanatory Texts Capturing Historical,
Scientific, or Technical Processes with Appropriate/Applicable Use of Formatting, Graphics, and
Multimedia (NGA, CCSSO, 2010) the researcher identified that:
• Students annotate sources to reflect a succinct explanation of the key discipline
specific SPECS details contained within the research;
• Students capture the big ideas and SPECS themes through appropriate use of charts,
tables, graphics, and other visual techniques;
• Students locate, analyze, and document their use of graphs, data charts, and
multimedia to evidence from their source material.
For the dimension of CCSS F- Using Technology and the Internet to Dynamically
Produce, Publish, Share and Display Information (NGA, CCSSO, 2010) the researcher identified
that:
• Students maintain a regularly posted running record to capture their understanding
and inquiry process;
• Students use hyper-linking techniques to effectively create a portfolio effect to allow
a user to quickly navigate around the information they have developed for their
project;
• Students summarize succinctly the big ideas of their project via social media/
121
For the dimension of CCSS G- Gathering Relevant Authoritative Print and Digital
Sources Effectively, Assessing their Usefulness, and Integrating without Plagiarizing (NGA,
CCSSO, 2010) the researcher identified that:
• Students include a range of usable findings located from multiple print and digital
sources located over a period of time;
• Students capture the process of researching by documenting the challenges incurred
during research;
• Students cite their research using a combination of paraphrasing and quotations.
For the dimension of Jenkins A- Collective Intelligence (2009):
• Students collaborate with peers, educators, and outside experts’ work through online
environments;
• Students evidence the use of online tools to ask and pose questions and gain support
from peer-to-peer efforts;
• Students incorporate resources pooled from the research efforts of other individuals
involved in social studies outside of the school.
For the dimension of Jenkins B- Transmedia Navigation (2009):
• Students generating a public information campaign that includes evidence-based
information shared through a range of social media;
• Students support a coherent position with evidence by weaving a narrative throughout
multiple media;
• Students demonstrate a sophistication in their selection of the most appropriate medium
for individual pieces/formats of their message.
For the dimension of Jenkins C- Networking (2009):
122
• Students incorporate specialized content from specialized sources gathered through
targeted research efforts that extend beyond ubiquitous sources, that is they do more
than just use Google;
• Students obtain feedback via social media from students not in their class section, the
larger school community, and with participants beyond the school’s doors;
• Students interact with individuals beyond the school’s doors in acts of civic
participation through their sharing if ideas via social media.
Maintaining reliability in the use of the VOR-SWAR. To support reliability in the
implementation of this rubric, the researcher and the participating teachers scheduled several
meetings during which they would achieve calibration by exploring the rubric and discussing the
expected ways in which students might demonstrate mastery of these areas.
The anticipated value of engaging the researcher and both teacher participants to discuss
project expectations and assessment was three-fold. It firstly provided confirmatory
opportunities to understand the evidence which participant educators expected—thereby
shedding light on the emic and etic interpretive perspectives that might differ between researcher
and participants.
It secondly built and opportunity for the participant teachers to develop their capacity, a
feature that might allow them to maintain the value of this research approach in the future of
their careers and the site. This helped to actuate one goal held by some design-based researchers
to contribute positively within the space of research by helping to contribute to the building of a
larger theoretical space.
123
It thirdly created a more collaborative climate that supports the research activities as
being an integrated experience for the educators and students within the course, rather than an
obtrusive external element.
The Data
Points of collection. This research focused on the curricular artifacts generated and
collected during an approximately five-week period during which participating students at the
research site are engaged with the Voices of Representation project. In one sense, the participant
teachers and students are creating artifacts for collection throughout that entire period. Materials
developed will be slowly combined into two digital portfolio sets.
There are two distinct points in the proposed research methodology at which data is
collected within this research methodology. The first data collection was aligned early in the
process— after participants had given consent/assent, when they had made use of an initial set of
researcher designed scaffolds as the basis of which they formally submitted their first portfolio of
work. The portfolio was to be assessed using the VOR-SAR. It was this data collection point
that was designed to provide the aggregate data that most directly informs the second generation
of scaffolds.
The final point of data collection was to occur after the student participants formally
submit their second portfolio of work. The portfolio of work would be once again assessed using
the VOR-SWAR—with teachers reporting their findings. The data collected from the student
work was to be accompanied by a post-research teacher interviews occurring during this period.
The teacher interviews were to be utilized primarily to provide a potential confirmatory analysis
of trends in participants’ perceptions of the value they saw in the scaffolds and the work process.
124
The Data Sources. This research used two major sources for its data: two student
portfolios and a set of one-on-one teacher interviews. Each of the data sources was designed to
contribute different information and elements to the overall research process.
There were two portfolios of student work to be submitted. One was to be collected as
the mid-point data collection point and one at the end of the process. Each provided direct
evidence of students’ performance response to the tasks as laid out in the scaffold documents at
different stages. Each submission of student work was to be followed by an analysis of the
student work content using the VOR-SWAR rubric. At the mid-point, the resultant data was to
be used in its aggregate form to inform alterations to the hard and soft scaffolds used with
students. As described earlier, to find evidence of each of the ten dimensions in the student
work, the evaluators of student work were to use the VOR-SWAR rubric to analyze students’
success in evidencing the mastery skills involved in these ten dimensions.
The one-on-one teacher interviews scheduled to occur at the end of data collection were
anticipated to serve as a confirmatory and complementary opportunity to expand on perception
of trends in the integration and application of the scaffolds. The interviews were important to the
researcher in that they represented a meaningful opportunity for the participatory teachers to
maintain voice and have an ongoing investment in the research process.
This researcher has consistently valued the way in which such processes provide respect
to the teachers as competent professionals within the education field who are equal participants
by virtue of the great content-specific materials that ground the course in which the Voices of
Representation Curriculum unit is placed. In addition, the interviews were anticipated to help
cement the teachers’ own journey within the process of building their capacity and considering
future implementations of similar projects.
125
The Curricular Product
It was anticipated that the research process—with its two iterations of scaffolds and two
sets of student work to analyze— would provide the researcher with qualitative data pertaining
specifically regarding the apparent interplay of scaffolds and resulting work. The ultimate
expected product of the entire research process from November 2014 through March 2015 was
anticipated to be a revised form of the Voices of Representation Curriculum which could be
made available for future teachers or researchers interested in these approach to scaffolding
student learning.
Considerations for Human Subjects
This research sought and received an exemption from the university Institutional Review
Board. The application for exemption relied on content from Appendix B of the Investigator
Manual in §46.101, under section b-1 as it takes place in a traditional education setting involving
normal educational practices and it involves research on educational practices, instructional
techniques, and classroom methods (United States, 1990). This research proposed a curricular-
design project and the participant students are not the unit of analysis. The student work and its
teacher evaluations reviewed within the proposed research process were parallel to the kind of
chart reviews that might be conducted in a medical facility. The resultant dynamic of reviewing
data product separated from individuals establishes the threshold of their being no more than
minimal risk for human subjects based on their indirect involvement.
The research’s interaction with human subjects that are minors was limited to the
collection of aggregate data regarding the analysis of the students’ work and not their own
individual change conditions. Families of the students involved were provided informed consent
about the curricular nature and design of the research project and provided the option to exempt
126
their child’s documents from being counted within the research procedures. Students were asked
to assent to their involvement after their parents had provided consent. Faculty members
participating in the project were provided informed consent and were offered the additional
benefit option to be credited by name if they so wish as educators participating in the practice
research. The researcher incorporated a similar request of the city’s department of education
IRB committee, and obtained district approval to research at the proposed site.
Ultimately, the methodology used in this research holds great consideration for human
subjects because design-based research in this setting represents an attuned school-improvement
method that supports educators in their own educational practice improvement process by
producing rich site-specific detail that may in turn be a starting point for developing theories.
The research process additionally offered greater curricular benefit to all participants
present and future within said school site, as the curricular refinement focused on the increased
alignment of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge—all aspects of the rigorous
teaching central to the school’s core academic pillars and essential academic mission.
As the research site was a well-established school that is functional by all local and state
quality review measures, the research activities provided no harm to students’ experience of
receiving high-quality teaching throughout the process. The research simply complemented the
existing work of the teachers, modeling the research site’s existing commitment to university
partnerships, and building further capacity among the teacher participants.
Additionally, this research was consistent with the research site’s long-standing trend to
collaborate with local universities and educators to enhance teaching practice. The site’s
involvement with this dissertation research adds additional benefit for the school to be able to
127
identify a connection to research being conducted under the supervision and approval of a
nationally recognized higher education institution in this field.
This research initiative’s design-based research approach truly allowed for tremendous
social and educational benefits for its participations. The research approach embraced the
affordance extolled by Sasha Barab (2014) in his publications as he argues that the model
“improves learning for those participants in the study” (p. 155) due to its commitment to creating
positive change in a program or service offered to those subjects.
In addition, as the research occurred almost entirely within the constraints of existing
course activities and typical school procedures, it posed minimal risk, leaving only the possibility
of boredom or wasted time among teacher or student participants who do not perceive the
content of the curricular scaffolds to help further their academic goals.
128
Chapter 4: Research Iterations Around the VORC
Working with the VORC
This research applied design-based research methods to fine-tune the Voices of
Representation Curriculum (VORC) model. VORC offered a curricular product that sought to
enhance secondary students’ civic participation in government by offering tools to support their
documentarian efforts. This curriculum promoted oral history as a problem-based approach to
studying high school history, and aligned it to Common Core and New Media Literacies.
Students were provided supportive scaffolds that help them in the gathering, interpretation, and
sharing of data. These scaffolds provided exemplars that support students in successfully
completing assignments to quality completion.
VORC assignments directed students beyond the school building’s metaphoric doors,
having them create a virtual space in which external interviews are shared, individualized
research compiled, researcher perspectives shared, and peer feedback provided. Applying the
principles of problem-based learning, the VORC directed students to identify research areas,
target research subjects, and discern arguments and counter-arguments among their sources. By
design, this research set out to further develop high school students’ new media literacies by
showcasing how online environments can provide a medium in which students’ real-world
historical inquiries can be shared, critiqued, and developed as students engage in civic
participation as modern historians. The Oral History Project (n.d.) has argued that, “Oral history
is both the oldest type of historical inquiry, predating the written word, and one of the most
modern, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s and now using 21st-century digital
technologies” (p. 1).
129
VORC used this signature social studies pedagogy to engage students as academic
detectives of the lived through historical experience and engages them to inductively develop
their understanding through personal play and discovery of real world testimony about
contemporary history. This embraced the pedagogy of hands on problem-based learning
envisioned by a range of educational thought leaders discussed earlier: John Dewey (1998);
Maria Montessori (Bagby & Sulak, 2009); Deborah Meier and Theodore Sizer (Coalition of
Essential Schools, 2010; Muncey & Mcquillan, 1993). In these learning models, students are
able to incorporate their own doing and exhibition of their findings as a form of authentic
assessment.
The last chapter detailed the methodological approach and the details involved in the
execution of the actual process. The Voices of Representation Curriculum was presented to the
two of the twelfth-grade history teachers at the research site during late November and December
of 2014. VORC introduced the teachers to a model that applied the principles of TPACK to
support a unified space in which the affordances of technologies could interplay with both the
social studies signature pedagogies and some specific content knowledge involved in civics and
participation in government.
At the core of the VORC was cognitive scaffolding. Much of the survey of the literature
that informed the development of this research cited the mismatch of technology, pedagogy, and
content knowledge. The results were often a lack of clarity and capacity-- neither teachers nor
students understood exactly how the project was expecting to proceed.
This VORC consisted of both hard and soft scaffolding, delineated by both the hard
structural elements which designed and conceptualized the students’ understanding in broad built
pedagogies and the soft more responsive scaffolding which supported the students through
130
timely assessment and development based on emergent needs for greater understanding (Saye &
Brush, 2002). Based on the survey of the literature detailed in chapter 2, these scaffolds support
the ability to better align the technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge involved in the
academic study with the student learning process.
The analysis offered in this chapter documents the design improvements that occurred as
a result of participant feedback and is aimed at increasing the robustness and effectiveness of the
curriculum. The two participant teachers provided ongoing feedback through a series of face-
to-face, phone, and texting conversations. This feedback was informed by their direct
interactions with student end-users and incorporated both teacher concerns and student concerns
as reported by these teachers. In addition, the researcher was able to engage in direct
observation on one occasion of the teacher rolling out a scaffold to which participant students’
reaction informed further design choices. In addition, after iteration one of the scaffolds had
been rolled out, there were a series of data collection shaped by teacher gathered information and
assessment which informed the second iteration.
These data points were used to fine-tune the scaffolds for their use in a second iteration.
This chapter will detail the first and second iteration collection of data and the resultant design
changes. Finally, this chapter will identify data collected in a confirmatory fashion after the
second iteration changes.
Research Timeline
This research occurred during December 2014 and January 2015, conducted at a school
location approved through the local education department’s IRB and by principal approval.
131
Meetings occurred with the school’s administration and the teachers who committed to the
research process. Two twelfth grade history teachers agreed to the research occurring in their
courses.
Materials regarding the research process, including consent and assent forms, were
shared within the school community as per IRB approvals during December 2014. The first
iteration of scaffold materials was distributed immediately before and immediately after the
winter holiday break and New Year’s Eve week. Students completed a set of assignment
materials for their teachers, an initial portfolio of work, having worked with the scaffolds.
Although teachers did not follow through to the originally proposed research model of
completing grading of the student work using the VOR-SWAR rubric, they did engage in holistic
grading. They reported feedback to the researcher that was based in the categories on the VOR-
SWAR and provided informed feedback on areas in which the resultant student product from the
first iterations fell short.
The second iteration of scaffolds was provided to students in mid to late January to
support students as they engaged in another cycle of oral history related activities. Students
submitted their products to teachers and classmates online and engaged in an on-site presentation
exposition on January 30, 2015. In mid-March, a confirmatory post-research interview was
conducted with the teacher participants.
Shift from beta to first iteration. All six scaffolds existed in an original form of
conceptual content and draft material-- designed as a curricular product informed from previous
action research activities while the researcher was directly engaged in classroom teaching and
collaborative curriculum planning.
132
The Voices of Representation Curriculum made use of both hard scaffolds with their built-in
pedagogical structures and soft scaffolds with their emergent responsive student-centered nature.
The beta format of these scaffolds included six distinct scaffolds- two hard scaffolds and four
soft scaffolds. A chart below indicates the original content pages in process of design to offer
soft scaffolds on best practices to students. As initial meetings with participant teachers
occurred, conceptual changes began with many of the scaffolds resulting in the first iteration
scaffolds taking a different basic format to support students creating a broader portfolio within
the space of two platforms- Google Drive and Wikispaces. As continued dialogue with the
participant teachers emerged perceived student/teacher concerns, a 1.5 iteration of the soft-
scaffolds emerged.
Table 1.
Disaggregation of Beta Soft Scaffolds by Compositional Web Content
Original Design Beta Soft Scaffolds
Scaffold is comprised of these pages
Gathering Primary Sources and secondary
sources beyond the classroom
WC- Tips for a Good Oral History
Post a Prezi*
Mini-Interviews Oral History Pinterest
Board*
Sharing Your Research Digitally
Youtube style video Downloading Your
Interviews
WC- Upload your 3-5 Interview Videos
Presenting Content in Online Social
Environments
Using Glogster to Capture Research Ideas
Presenting Standards Through Prezi
Offering Online Analysis of Researched Work
Analyzing Your Sources
Standards for Commenting
Although these were the originally planned content elements, a different vision quickly
emerged inspired by the questions and concerns raised in initial integration meetings occurring in
November and December 2015. What formed from these meetings with the teachers, was a
133
more refined Voices of Representation Curriculum (VORC) which embedded an iterative
process for students to conduct oral history interviews. To support them across this process- a
collection of two hard and four soft scaffolds were further developed.
The VORC curriculum hard scaffolds consisted of two distinct items-- an Assignment
document and a Voices of Representation Student Work Assessment Rubric. The student work
rubric was set to have no changes made throughout the process, to serve as a constant. The
Assignment document was rolled out with information on the initial assignment work, with the
intent of gathering data from teacher and student usage, to provide fine-tuning. The design intent
of the Assignment documentation was to operationalize assignment actions and expectations in a
way that would support students’ clarity. The design intent of the Student Work Assessment
Rubric was to provide students interested in self-assessment the opportunity to evaluate their
own work against mastery standards.
Also under researcher were several soft scaffolds, supportive items for students that
emerged from observational or formative feedback. These scaffolds were introduced in
preliminary form to the participant teachers, who provided two forms of feedback that allowed
for targeted alterations during the roll-out of these scaffolds-- teacher feedback and student
feedback.
The soft scaffolds included several items which were intended to provide students
support and provide both students and teachers anchoring in key Technology, Pedagogy, And
Content Knowledge (TPACK) areas. Below is a chart of the four soft scaffold areas: Working
with Primary and Secondary Sources Beyond the Classroom; Sharing Your Research Digitally;
Offering Online Analysis of Researched Work; and Presenting Interactive Content in Online
Social Environments. This chart reflects that for each soft scaffold area, between 1 and 3 digital
134
documents were created to provide students a direct 24/7 resources that clarify the process and
depth of expected student submissions. Depending on the content materials and areas of focus,
students may have received step-by-step screenshots for completion of the task, a checklist
focusing on key process steps with further hyperlinked best practices, or a model of what
conceptual questions a student should be answering in order to complete a well-thought out
response.
Table 2.
Disaggregation of scaffold by relevant CCSS/Jenkins skills, content, and TPACK
Scaffold
Organized to
Provide Support
With...
Content Materials
TPACK area
of focus
Gathering
Primary
Sources and
secondary
sources beyond
the classroom
Best practices
in preparation
and execution
of oral history
interviews.
WC- Tips for a Good Oral History
(http://oralhistoryinterviews.wikispaces.co
m/Tips+for+a+Good+Oral+History);
Additional Tips from Willa Baum via UC
Berkley Bancroft
Additional Tips from The American
Folklife Center
Turning The Mini-Interviews into a
Digital Collection
http://oralhistoryinterviews.wikispaces.co
m/Mini+Interview+Assignment
Content
Knowledge
Sharing Your
Research
Digitally
Techniques for
the uploading
and
hyperlinking of
original primary
source research
and
hyperlinking of
secondary and
tertiary research
Youtube style video Downloading Your
Interviews
(https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9yUcm
nJbef3VHV3di1zWlFNdG8/view?usp=sh
aring);
WC- Upload your 3-5 Interview Videos
(http://oralhistoryinterviews.wikispaces.co
m/Upload+your+3-5+Mini-
Interview+videos);
Share Your Large Files
(http://oralhistoryinterviews.wikispaces.co
m/share+your+large+video+files+from+G
oogle+Drive+into+Wikispaces)
Technology
(continued)
135
Scaffold
Organized to
Provide Support
With...
Content Materials
TPACK area
of focus
Presenting
Content in
Online Social
Environments
Providing
students with
best practices
and practical
knowledge on
commenting on
documentarian
content online
Editing Our Class Page & Developing
Your Own Page
http://oralhistoryinterviews.wikispaces.co
m/OWN+PAGE ;
WC- Project Explanations-Offering
Context/SPECS
http://oralhistoryinterviews.wikispaces.co
m/Project+Expectations ;
Using the Comment Function
http://oralhistoryinterviews.wikispaces.co
m/using+the+comment+function
Pedagogy
Offering
Online
Analysis of
Researched
Work
Highlighting the
analytic aspects
of their own
documentarian
findings
including
assessment of
sources;
Providing
substantive
commentary on
others’ research
work
Analyzing Your Sources
http://oralhistoryinterviews.wikispaces.co
m/Analyze+your+Sources;
Standards for Commenting
http://oralhistoryinterviews.wikispaces.co
m/Standards+for+Commenting
Common
Core State
Standards/
New Media
Literacies
In our research, the scaffolds were released in two iterations-- with a focus on gathering
data to support fine-tuning of the scaffolds between iterations. As the soft scaffolds are, by
design, responsive to students’ emergent understanding, the soft scaffolds experienced a stage we
can call 1.5 in which they had experienced adaptation in format or delivery shaped by participant
feedback.
Data Sources
Data from project participants and from researcher field notes was utilized at each stage
of development. For the first iteration of the scaffolds, data sources included researcher design
136
statements; the 12G History Online Username Collection Survey; teacher email/phone/text
discussions; an aggregate review of student work; teacher email and discussions, and field note
design journal entries from 12/8, 12/12, 12/17, 1/3/15, and 1/10/15. Particularly of note were
face-to-face meetings with the teacher participants at their site on December 8 (RR), December
12 (MM), and Dec 17. In addition, a site visits to observe teacher RR and students on January 8
offered impactful feedback that impacted essential changes in the roll out of the first iteration of
scaffolds.
Curricular Development During the 1st Iteration
Hard scaffold: VOR assignment sheet. According to the original design statement, the
VOR assignment sheet was designed to “support students with hard scaffolding that makes visible
the thinking process by laying it out in a step-by-step checklist the practices that will help them
identify, conduct, and follow up on oral history interviews” (B. Schneider, personal
communication, Nov 14, 2014). Initial teacher discussions in late November and on December 8
provided the opportunity to clarify the common understanding that students would produce two
sessions of digital content to represent their work on conducting oral histories.
The drafted version of the VOR Assignment Sheet incorporated a number of specific
elements: a quotation on the subject-specific value of oral history, direct content from two
reputable web-based oral history projects, a timeline of student assignment deliverables, the
“broken out” action steps or tasks involved in doing the activities for all interview stages, an
empty-box checklist of “things I need to do for the interview process,” and an oral history release
form (B. Schneider, personal communication, Nov 14, 2014).
At the initial face-to-face meeting on December 8, teacher participant RR (personal
communication, December 8, 2014) shared that, “When I used oral history in this course before
137
the seniors didn’t believe they can get something that big done in the time. They’re
overwhelmed with the other graduation requirements and I don’t think the students will be able
to see the value of doing the preparation pieces and will end up scrambling last minute.”
The other teacher participant, MM (personal communication, Dec 12, 2014), indicted at
the December 12 face-to-face meeting that, “Unless students find that it’s easy to arrange their
interviews quickly they’re going to argue that it’s impossible to do this with all of the college
and internship requirements we have. They need to know that it feels more overwhelming that it
is to complete.” As a result of these two concerns, a design change was made to alter the mini-
interview element that students were to originally conduct as preparation for the interview. In
the new writing, it was instead described as an independent set of 3 10-minute interviews they
would conduct among adults already part of their daily life around a high-profile contemporary
issue that has affected a massive number of residents in their city-- with well-known local
terrorism and weather events as key examples. This process was proposed with a deadline of
interviews taking place over the break and digitization and sharing to occur after the break.
During a face-to-face meeting with both teacher participants they both expressed that
they needed in the words of MM, “time after the assignment was due to account for students that
just haven’t completed the interviews and need more catch-up time” (MM, personal
communication, Dec 17, 2014). Interpreting this request as a need for wait time in the traditional
instructional sense, this researcher adapted the timeline on the assignment document to allow a
full calendar week of time for the digital work that was to follow up the 10-12 days students
already had to being the mini-interview process due to their break. To incorporate the ongoing
decision-space teachers wanted around which software platforms/apps were to be used, the VOR
Assignment Sheet indicated that elements due from the three software-specific work items would
138
be due on January 12th with digital details to be provided to students after their extended break.
(personal communication, December 20, 2014, “VOR Assignment Sheet”).
The participant teachers were provided the VOR Assignment Sheet as a digitally
shareable document during the weekend of December 20, 2014 for their review and usage with
students on the following Monday and Tuesday. Teachers opted to share the scaffold with
students via physical paper and conducted in-class discussions to review the scaffold’s content.
During Phone multiple phone conversations in the two weeks that followed a refrain was
repeated captured in a phone call over the holiday break that, “students have one place to look
for up-to-the-minute details about the project” (MM, personal communication, December 29,
2014).
On January 5th and 6th, 2015 the VOR Assignment sheet was adapted into a Wikispaces
page designed to create an updatable web-based presence where all class participants could
easily find a digital hyperlinked version of the handout. The digital nature of the Wikispaces-
based assignment sheet allowed this version 1.5 of the assignment sheet to incorporate direct
links to other soft scaffolding elements, like “Turning the Mini-Interviews into a Digital
Collection” that supported students as they generated the specifics of their digital portfolio.
During the week of January 10-16, participant teachers took ongoing ownership, actually
utilizing the tool itself on January 16 to reduce the number of required comment responses. The
changed text read, “4. Leave comments on the Wiki page of ONE (1) student, TWO (2) students
(from either section), commenting thoughtfully on TWO (2) THREE (3) of their videos and their
analysis of the videos, using the following Standards for Commenting” (Schneider, 2015a,
“Standards for Commenting”).
139
Hard scaffold: VOR SWAR rubric- The VOR-SWAR Rubric was provided to the teacher
participants well in advance of the roll-out to students with the understanding that they were to
share these with students alongside the VOR Assignment sheet. Aside from its expected role in
the methodological data gathering, the design intention expressed in the VOR SWAR’s
instructional classroom usage was, “In this case, the use of a rubric with mastery standards listed
is to offer students a specific idea of the traits which would be seen in a successful final
presentation” (B. Schneider, personal communication, Nov 14, 2014).
The two teacher participants shared that they did not share these rubrics physically on
December 22 and 23rd. After students returned to classes on January 3, the VOR Student Work
Assessment Rubric was shared via the Wikispaces public portal. It was presented as a
downloadable Microsoft Word document in a section marked, Understanding The Project
Expectations. It was accompanied by the detail line, “Check out the rubric used to grade you-
Check out the rubric below being used to evaluate your project submission for the Mini-
Interviews Digital Collection” (Schneider, 2015a, “Understanding the Project Expectations”).
The VOR SWAR was the only scaffold that was to by design, remain unchanged. This
was due to its originally intended use as a tool with which teachers could engage in student work
analysis. That aggregate trend data in students meeting categorical standards was to be used by
the researcher as artifact to inform changes for iteration two, rather than teachers’ verbal
reporting holistic grading of students demonstrated understanding against these mastery
standards. The rubric remained unchanged in this phase of the research.
Soft scaffold: how to collect & organize primary and secondary sources beyond the
classroom. The design plan for the first soft scaffold involved, “[it’s intent]...was to support
students in shore up a transmedia narrative that captured big social studies ideas-- clarifying
140
procedural best practices for gathering content and showcasing it across digital platforms,” (B.
Schneider, personal communication, Nov 14, 2014). This description might be termed as having
a metacognitive goal-- one that provides a conceptual scaffold to support organization in a manner
that would allow students to facilitate digital publishing. There were two elements in the original
design of this scaffold: a best practices oral-history tip process and a platform by platform break
down to support students in matching digital steps and subject-specific formatting. The two digital
documents that comprise this scaffold are the following: Tips for a Good Oral History and Turning
The Mini-Interviews into a Digital Collection. The first document contained best practices in
arranging and preparing for an oral history interview and had been previously debuted/distributed
with the assignment sheet. The second content piece shared a discipline-influenced method for
organizing content knowledge research and adapting it across digital platforms. In its originally
designed format, it included, for example, summarizing key details of their interviewees
demographics to host in Pinterest and generating detailed breakdowns of Social, Political, Cultural,
Economic, and Spatial/Geographic context within Prezi. In this sense, the scaffold was developed
as an anchor to support teachers with the content knowledge called for by the tasks in which
students would engage.
This scaffold had the most complex redevelopment during this first iteration phase,
changing in both detail and structure from its original form. Debuted at the January 5 live launch
of the Wikispaces public document and shared with the teachers for students’ usage the
following day, this page went through 12 edits between January 10th and January 16th. The
volume of design tweaks were made to address formative concerns that were informed by
teacher communications on the evenings of classes via the phone, and through the researcher’s
direct observation of teacher RR working with a class on Thursday, January 8th.
141
The teachers’ brief phone calls expressed details of negative reactions and complaints
about “You want us to sign up for two many sites,” and “I don’t want to get spam from all these
programs” (RR & MM, personal communication, January 3, 2015). During the class session
observed on January 8, students commented to the teacher on a series of questions or concerns
they had with the originally proposed use of Prezi, Pinterest, and Facebook. Teachers had
previously used online communication and a face-to-face visit on January 3 to collaboratively
select these from a document of software options suggested by the researcher. Students
expressed explicitly a range of concerned statements with the following getting many seconded
responses:
I don’t want teachers and parents having my Facebook username.
Why can’t we use Tumblr to write about these interviews?
I don’t want to give my information out to these websites.
We have to do all this and Google drive too? I’m still learning how to do that.
Why can’t we put it all in one place? (Students A-D; personal communication, January
8, 2015)
RR pulled aside the researcher to ask a clarifying question about whether the Wikispaces
platform students were using for information gathering could be utilized to support students’
information sharing. After hearing an affirmation that students’ work could be collaboratively
edited in a social media manner and changes tracked, RR explored students’ comfort in working
with said platform.
Observing this interaction had a profound effect on the alterations to this scaffold,
engendering alterations in identifying what software platforms were to be used but also
reshaping an effort for all content to be organized within Wikispaces. This result rippled to other
scaffolds, resulting in the youtube-style video on Downloading Video Files to be hosted dually in
Google Drive and a displayable shareable embedded link in Wikispaces. It also reflected the
challenges present when technology comes together with pedagogy and content knowledge. On
142
a practical level, students had concerns related to the affordances of social media technologies.
Teachers, lacking specific familiarity, were stymied by how to respond to said concerns.
Teachers also expressed concerns about complexity of scaffolds, with MM (personal
communication, January 9, 2015) having expressed that “Some of my students who are really
into it want to be clear on what to write. “Kids are finding the level of detail overwhelming to
read. Can this be reshaped so that there are no more than 2-3 big ideas available on a screen?”
The resultant design impacts on the scaffold were a change in format and content that
provided a less text-heavy content and relying on hyper-linking of text to bridge across scaffolds.
As a result, a section that originally contained a text-heavy blend of all key requirements of a
Wikispaces personal portfolio page, with SPECS standards borrowed from the corresponding
Presenting Content in Online Environments scaffolded that detailed SPECS formats shifted from
their in-text usage on January 10 to being a series of smaller properly white-spaced mini-pages,
all accessible as links from this main scaffold.
A similar change was documented in the alterations of the oral history best practices that
were part of this scaffold area. Originally, students had the content of discipline best practices in
a paper format given out within the VOR Assignment sheet distribution. This scaffold was set to
debut on the website in its identical to paper format. Based on teacher feedback from MM, this
content was re-parsed into a lead page with a highlighting the checklist of the concrete steps for
students to take in organizing the oral history session, and with hyperlinks at the bottom of the
page to the two national university sponsored oral history projects from which the researcher had
selected discipline-standard best practices.
Both sub-sections of this scaffolded benefitted in their 1.5 iteration from the initial end-
user feedback about their structure and the practices they highlighted. Although the teacher and
143
student input about their willingness to commit the time and the number of programs the site
guides them toward, the feedback inspired a design change to support students being required to
demonstrate transmedia skills in presenting their text, their video, their links to their survey of
literature, and their commentary on their own and classmates’ work -- mixed formats and media
content within a single knowledge management platform. As described above in the section on
the hard scaffold VOR Assignment sheet, once these two sections were linked digitally, one of
the participant teachers demonstrated a comfort in using the Wikispaces tool to edit an assigned
number of required comment responses.
Soft scaffold: Sharing your research digitally. “At the heart of this curriculum is the
need to share original video content. This scaffold is meant to support students and their teachers
in understanding the concrete steps to share and display their interview work” (B. Schneider,
personal communication, Nov 14, 2014) indicated the original design statement. This scaffold
originally consisted of a basic Downloading Your Video segment shot in an informal
conversational YouTube style. It was meant to be sent directly to students via email. It also
included an Upload your 3-5 Mini-Interview page with a basic set of directions regarding sending
of large files. The original uploading page attempted a fully embedded video on downloading and
some basic link information regarding a Dropbox folder share. In this sense, the scaffold was
designed to anchor and support teachers through the technological elements of the tasks students
were being asked to complete.
During each of the early face-to-face sessions in December, both MM and RR voiced
concerns with the technological uploading tasks. MM (personal communication, December, 12,
2015) joked, “We don’t have fancy iPad labs set up here,” a commented repeated at multiple
face-to-face sessions afterward. Immediately preceding the start of the on-site class observation
144
RR said (personal communication, January 8, 2015) of sharing the video files, “I don’t know
how to do this and I’m not sure how to explain it to the students.” During a brief conversation
with MM (personal communication, January 8, 2015), he expressed his belief that, “the students
aren’t going to do this project if they have a really hard time submitting their files.”
The ongoing nature of these technological concerns from the teachers suggested that it
was an area of great that linked to an expressed sense that lack of clarity in technical tasks might
lead to a social-emotional shut-down to the assignment. These concerns impacted two major
design changes between January 8th and 14th. The first, was a decision to move away from a
Dropbox based platform, as teacher feedback and the observed student statements during the
class visit, indicated a pressing social-emotional concern that sign-ups for new services be more
limited. As many students had indicated on initial digital surveys that they owned a Gmail
address, the Google Drive platform was modeled both for its easy accessibility while signed into
email and due to the cost-effective nature of renting large amounts of file space. The other
change involved a version 1.5 roll out of the scaffolds with vast expansion of detail, inspired by
the teachers’ repeated concerns at the January 8th session.
In the resultant final first iteration form, the scaffold expanded to include two more
threshed out and distinct hyperlinked documents within the Wikispaces environment and linked
onto the project support home page. These documents were Upload your 3-5 Mini-Interviews
which was published first and Share Your Large Video Files from Google Drive into Wikispaces
which was published second.
The first document Upload your 3-5 Mini-Interviews file grew into a series of screen-by-
screen images to both detail and demonstrate how Google Drive can be used to share memory
intensive files and to suggest a hierarchical structure for organizing said files. In nine steps and
145
twice as many screen images, the page walks you through a successfully completed file upload in
which, “9. You have now successfully shared the file with your teachers and classmates. Repeat
this step for any other interview videos you need to upload into this folder” (B. Schneider, 2015a,
January 10, 2015, “Upload your 3-5 Mini-Interviews”).
As part of the expansion of this page, the original Downloading Your Video was
hyperlinked at the top of this page with a Wikispaces command to open a new window. The
resultant link effect to directly display of the video in new window found an effective skunk-
work to avoid the Wikispace challenge of directly embedding the video into the page. Text next
to the link on the page direct students “then click on the following video accessed from my
google drive folder” (B. Schneider, 2015a, January 10, 2015, “Upload your 3-5 Mini-
Interviews”). This design change was done strategically, to respond to the MM’s concerns and
help both teachers and students see that sharing a video for the whole class’ eyes can be
accomplished with a technique detailed in the remaining section of the scaffold.
The second document Share Your Large Video Files from Google Drive into Wikispaces,
was added on January 14, provided students with a breakdown of seven steps and eight screen
images. The steps listed on the page took them through the intricacies of making a publically
shareable link through Google Drive that can be embedded in other applications for web-based
viewing.
Just like the first soft scaffold described above, this scaffold experienced an initial change
during the first iteration roll out. The depth of initial changes focused around adding step-
specific transparency to the acts of uploading and sharing the digital files.
Soft scaffold: presenting interactive content in online social environments. The third
scaffold designed for the curriculum includes elements on making a class page and individual
146
pages in Wikispaces, developing a robust context section, and engaging in the peer-driven act of
leaving and responding to comments. According to the original design statement, the scaffold’s
goal was, “getting students pro-active in the process of defining their own online space and
presence through their own comments and others’ provocative questions regarding their displayed
work” (B. Schneider, personal communication, Nov 14, 2014). On a purely technical level, the
content elements of this scaffold provided a type of template or vision statement, i.e. the expected
visual look and the sound or writing voice the material should possess.
Portions of this scaffold experienced more singular design changes than other scaffolds,
generally resulting in a one fell swoop change and relied more heavily on the initial versions or
pre-existing documents within the curriculum. The scaffold originally consisted of Own Page,
and Context. The latter was changed in title and content to Offering the Context of Your
Interview Using SPECS. After initial teacher concerns were expressed via phone conversations
on Jan 10th to clarify final expectations regarding the analysis elements of commenting, a third
newer portion to the scaffold was created in the form of Commenting on Each Others’ Work,
which provided a step-by-step process for commenting in Wikispaces.
The initial Own Page, portion that debuted on January 10th was released live
contemporaneously with a number of files described above. Its presence was directly connected
to the third task that appeared on the Project Steps for Working on Your Digital Portfolio portion
of the first soft scaffold. Students were directed to go into the common class page and edit it
with their name as an active hyperlink to a personal created new page of their own digital files
and commentary. The initial page design focused on 10-12 steps that provided screen images
and directions for editing, creating pages, and hyper-linking.
147
According to the researcher’s field notes for that date, “Despite the fact that it would be
easier to just list all the students’ names and link them to blank pages which students could edit, I
have been inspired by teachers’ fears about low student participation to make the students
complete this crafting of their own details to show they actually are invested in the project” (B.
Schneider, personal communication, January 10, 2015). The resultant appearance of 54 edits on
the Wikispaces history class page by a wide range of the student participants offered
demonstrated practice impact of the design choices on the end user.
During a phone conversation MM (personal communication, January 10, 2015) indicated
“Is there any way these links can open new windows? I think kids are going to get lost if they
have to keep hitting the back key on their browsers.” During that conversation, MM (personal
communication, January 10, 2015) also questioned “Are kids going to be able to find their way
around the site and not get lost about how to get back to the directions?” The research design
response was to add navigability in through the use of new window targets in the hyperlinks and
through hyperlinks that specifically directed back to main pages. “More steps are needed, I
think, based on these concerns-- steps that engage students in some navigation work too” (B.
Schneider, personal communication, January 10, 2015). As a result, the directions on Own Page
expanded to a total of sixteen steps that made use of twenty-five images. In this slightly more
increased depth, students were given explicit navigational goals that asked them to reflect on
navigability by seeing value in linking individual pages back to a communal page.
The second element of this scaffold Context held an original form that detailed a request
to provide background information on the circumstances and resources behind the issue. During
face-to-face meeting it had been said, “I think students are going to find it too abstract to locate
and describe all of that background” (MM, personal communication, January 8, 2015). Within
148
the context of field notes on the conversation, the researcher indicated, “A design change was
made to simplify and clarify the intent to a social studies lens promoted at a number of schools
with the mnemonic SPECS” (B. Schneider, personal communication, January 10, 2015). The
more explicit Offering the Context of Your Interview Using SPECS was reproduced from
participant teacher MM’s well-written summary of our January 8 face-to-face, delivered to the
researcher on January 9th in the form of a student-facing email to clarify what had been detailed
during class. The finalized page served as a template that offered a breakdown of key questions
that might be asked in using the social, political, economic, cultural, and spatial/geographic or
SPECS elements as a lens. It encouraged that they write 3 to 4 paragraphs of background i
through this guiding perspective. The final edits added that this analysis should follow a
collection of hyperlinks to their primary and secondary source materials.
The final element of this scaffold on Commenting, was added on January 11th. As the
student work was not scheduled until early January to be done via Prezi, the original plan
commenting was different. The phone and email conversations on the 10th regarding the depth
and breadth of commenting expectations made it clear that students needed concrete support.
“Is there an easy way for them to leave their comments and respond to each other?” (RR,
personal communication, January 8, 2015). The researcher had also been asked, “How can we
get them through doing this in so short a time if they’ve never left comments before?” (MM,
personal communication, January 8, 2015).
A design decision was made to generate a step-by-step model in response to teacher
concerns, with the design statement of, “In an effort to conform to a quick timeline with students
who may have never done this before, my goal was to show that commenting and following-up
on people’s responses can flow quick and easy” (B. Schneider, personal communication,
149
November 14, 2014). The resultant product offered five steps and utilized seven screen images.
The steps provided details on placing comments and using the monitoring function within the
platform.
At the top of the page, the document provided students directions, “Remember, we are
not using our power to edit each other’s pages by just going in an (sic) writing over their work.
Our goal is to ask them thoughtful, provocative questions that help them assess their own work”
(B. Schneider, 2015a, Jan 10, “Commenting”) This comment indicated some link to aspects of
the online environment offered in the final soft scaffold.
Soft scaffold: offering online analysis of researched work. This fourth soft scaffold was
designed as comprised of two parts, Analyzing Your Sources and Standards for Commenting.
However well intended the design vision behind offering a great variety of prompts for students to
learn the arts of document analysis, this scaffold element experienced massive changes from
intended design to iteration one roll out and version 1.5.
According to the design statement of this scaffold, “This scaffold aims to provide
students a conceptual understanding of what quality analysis would look like-- both in their
reflecting critically on their own work through an analysis of their sources and their commenting
on their peer’s work to reflect on similar intellectual concerns” (B. Schneider, personal
communication, November 14, 2014). This initial vision involved bringing students into contact
with hyperlinks on document and source analysis from the National Archives, Wikihow.com,
Linda Shoppe’s “Making Sense of Oral History” from History Matters, and from “The Process
of Historical Investigation” a University of California at Davis’ History Project document
relevant to post research and source analysis.
150
In an effort to respond to initial requests from the teachers, the researcher added the
equivalent of multiple handouts into the first iteration version gained much content from its
sources-- developing the UC Davis work into a giant table with three distinct sections-- one on
analyzing individual sources, one on analyzing multiple sources, and one on analyzing oral
history interview sources. Each section had multiple items or parts- and many bulleted
questions. The individual source section had sixteen bulleted items, the multiple source section
had sixteen, and the video analysis had thirty-eight bullets. In the effort to add specificity, the
content grew exponentially.
In an email that followed the sharing of this first iteration with the teachers, MM
(personal communication, January 10, 2015) indicated in an email “I have too much course
content to do with them to add any other elements like this. They should of course evaluate the
reliability of their interviewees, but not all sources of background info.” The researcher engaged
the teacher via email and phone about the value of a summarized eight prompt model.
According to field notes, “A design change was made despite the challenge of having just
growed the details greatly. To respond to intense concerns about students’ capacity to internalize
this collegiate set of detailed options, my review of the items suggested that they could be
grouped into about eight meta-categories to support students’ dissection of the interviewee
content” (B. Schneider, personal communication, January 10, 2015).
Version 1.5 of this scaffold experienced the most radical changes of any scaffold within
an iteration-- adapted at first down to a set of eight prompts and then down to two. Adapting the
question prompts used within the UC Davis document on historical investigation, the researcher
emerged An 8 Question Guide to Analyzing Your Sources. This version identified 8 analysis
tasks drawn from the document-- corroboration; dissonance; subject bias; interviewer bias;
151
historical explanation; challenging that explanation; counterargument, recommendations for
further investigation. In this version, each analysis task had a single question prompt to guide
writing.
In a follow up phone conversation, MM (personal communication, January 12, 2015)
asked, “Can’t it just be two or three questions?” As RR also expressed concerns about students
being ready to process their reflections and analysis during a time of many course projects and
exams.
The very final form of this section became a two-question guide to analyzing sources
with a very directive statement that students requested students reply to both questions in full-
paragraph format on their Personal Wiki Page under a section called Reflection on Your Sources.
The two questions, summarized provided prompt questions on only two of the above elements
corroboration and counterargument. These elements were identified in teacher-researcher
conversation as key to the rubric content. The final version of the page did retain links at the
bottom of the page to the wiki-how and National Archives websites for analyzing or working
with document inquiry.
The second set of materials contained in this scaffold focused on commenting. In its
original form on January 11th, the Standards for Commenting page included headings How can
people give thoughtful feedback on each other’s writing and social media content, A Model to
Evaluate Your Own Writing & Content, and A Model to (sic) Academically Commenting on Each
Other’s Writing & Content.
Each of these sections was developed for the first iteration as per a design statement goal
of, “This scaffold is meant to create a conceptual scaffolding around the hows and whys into two
of the scaffolds was made-- to clarify the method, the need, and the strategy for accomplishing
152
these goals around a quick timeline” (B. Schneider, personal communication, November 14,
2014). The original version of this page focused heavily on the use of three items assigned to
each of the above mentioned sections-- a link to Common Craft’s “Scoopville” YouTube video
that highlighted the ways in which information gleaned from social media commentary could
shape product development; excerpts from Will Richardson’s 2010 Spectrum of Blogging which
offered a rudimentary numerical coding for depth of response; and a description of the value to
provide academic content through platform specific tools.
In an email, MM (personal communication, January 10, 2015) expressed, “I think that the
scaffold on Effective Commenting on Social Media will be very important for them to have--I
was thinking they were going to need some standards for that. It is really like dragging them over
the finish line at this point in the year for me.” The resultant design change noted in field notes
was, “I wanted to add explanations to make sure that students understood the importance and
attention being given to the commenting” (B. Schneider, personal communication, January 10,
2015). Between its original form and the version rolled out several big changes were made
which added a lot of content.
The switch from Prezi to Wikispaces altered the sub-section on modeling academic
commenting to be an explanation of following the commenting/monitoring process in
Wikispaces. The other resultant change, was the addition of two new elements to this exemplar
for commenting including a sub-heading on, What are we expecting from you? that detailed a
process of using the monitoring to achieve the following stated goal:
it should be in the 5-10 range to reflect that a healthy dialogue has been going on
regarding the work. Over this period of 2 days, we expect that you can offer that amount
of re-reading their posts and commenting--- you Tweet and Facebook like this all the
time. (B. Schneider, 2015a, January 10, “Effective Commenting on Social Media”)
153
In addition, a second sub-head was placed in this model area to detail, “Need a Reminder- What
is Constructive Criticism?(sic) vs What is Tearing Work Down?” This area included a screen
image of a model for providing a critical comment on missing material framed in a positive way
and offered brief quotation and summary of a Clifford Lazarus article in Psychology Today
offering reasoning and technique for constructive non-combative statements.
Teacher MM had an intense response via email (personal communication, January 11,
2015) indicating, “I think this will overwhelm them. I will offer more specifics later but I am
NOT ready to send this out as it is here. Follow up discussion via phone, text, email established
a theme-- simplify vastly to ensure students’ social/emotional well-being to ensure they complete
project tasks without shutting down. “There’s too much to get through. I don’t think students
are going to read all that,” expressed teacher RR (personal communication, January 11, 2015).
Initial emails and phone conversations brought the 5-10 back and forth commenting responses
down to three comments made on two other students’ pages after having watched their materials
(B. Schneider, personal communication, January 11, 2015).
The concerns were about readability and quantity of tasks. The version 1.5 of this section
took on a much more simplified form structured around only two sections-- How can people give
thoughtful feedback on each others’ writing and social media content? and a Model for
Academic Commenting...What are We expecting from you?. The thoughtful feedback section
boiled down to two very basic premises. The first was a re-statement of the SPECS and analysis
content that other portions of the site indicated must be on their own page. The second was a
breakdown that each student was to respond to one other student’s work, replying with posts to
two other students’ videos offering three actionable comments.
154
The model for commenting section was also severely attenuated to include only two
elements-- a screen image example of encouraging feedback that offers thoughtful questions and
a repurposing of the “Scoopville” content under the line, “If you need further explanation on why
to taking commentary posts seriously” (B. Schneider, 2015a, “Effective Commenting on Social
Media.
The largest trend with these changes made to both parts of this scaffold was a process of
simplification that dropped exposition and the inquiry methods detailed content. It is not
possible in this context to determine whether the first iteration materials would been concerning
to all sites or presented a site-specific concern as to an excess of procedural detail for inquiry
activities. The impact of the intense feedback on the design was to eschew the level of detailed
option to a more simplified task list. The shift was from process-oriented steps that require time
to extremely simple procedural methods through which students were likely to develop product
that might be perceived as supporting their completion of task.
Refining Scaffolds for Iteration Two
Reviewing the assessments of student work to inform the changes. In mid-January,
students had submitted a range of work via the assigned combination of uploaded Google Drive
files and written hyper-linked Wikispaces material with commentary. Teachers’ assessment of
students’ capacity to meet project requirements was utilized as the main data collection/data source
to support teachers’ confirmatory trend comments regarding the fit between scaffold and task.
The two participant teachers reviewed the student materials with the intent to utilize the
Voices of Representation Student Work Assessment Rubric (VOR-SWAR) directly in their
grading of the pages. Instead of completing the rubric process physically and turning over these
written charts, they conveyed a time crunch and requested a face-to-face visit where they could
155
showcase content and share their holistic grading using the mastery standards column rather
than evaluating the work as on an Incomplete to Honors continuum which also appeared on the
rubric. They also felt this was apt and encouraging to students to reflect their performance
completion of new skill-sets.
As a result, the product of aggregate information shared with the researcher by the
teachers took on the form of a verbalized feedback from a face-to-face presentation session and
several clarifying phone calls post-meeting. As they did not have physical cover sheets to reflect
student trends beyond their grading, they had my chart review focus on scanning through page
content artifacts as they commented on their assessment of the page, rather than cover sheets of
grades.
The main premise given the approach that teachers used for grading was that a review of
student Portfolio content uploaded to the site provided the teachers’ best evidence-based
grounding to reflect on the scaffolds’ connection to student participation. Teachers highlighted a
series of findings for me that reflected students’ areas of demonstrated success with the products
on which scaffolds focused.
Twenty out of forty-one students completed the first task by properly linking their own
Mini-Interview Pages to the class page and embedding video or audio files downloaded from
their phones. Two additional students set up their pages with a written breakdown of their work
but no use of hyper-linking to embed the video files they uploaded to the Google Drive. Two
more students created their individual pages but did not complete the task. Teacher reports on
the seventeen students who did not complete task one on time indicated that these students were
all severely behind on the course and other graduation requirements in their other subjects.
156
Several additional students who had not created their own portfolio page had engaged in the
commenting on other people’s work.
Only a few students utilized hyper-linking to reflect their secondary sources-- although
these students tended to add richer reflection on these sources or develop ideas about them in
their writing.
Commenting from peers occurred on at least half of the posted pages. Comments from
peers tended to focus on items of interest they heard in the shared interview files, with a
personalized reflection on how it impacted their own thinking.
Very few students followed the given format precisely, although a number of students
embedded the guiding questions in a more free-form appearing single large paragraph. Most
students offered an analysis of their sources. Teachers evaluated that students who followed the
guiding questions on Analyzing Sources had “short and sweet” answers according to MM and
that according to RR, “captured a pretty accurate and thoughtful reflection on what their subjects
said” (MM & RR, personal communication, January 15, 2015). Students’ inclusion of SPECS
was most variable-- with many not including this as a breakout section or within their reflection.
The teachers’ presentation data and a visual review of the pages, indicated that in
aggregate, students fared best with demonstrating new media literacties of Collective
Intelligence, Transmedia Navigation, and Networking (Jenkins, 2009) labeled “MacArthur
WP/Jenkins” A, B, and C. Teachers cited a range of commenting and work sharing elements
that most strongly demonstrated Collective Intelligence and Transmedia Navigation in their eyes.
They cited the example of two students who had any self-described glitches with their file
embedding, instead making reference and linkage directly to the shared folders for the files and
157
their peers commenting on the video/audio showing that they navigated off the page and back
without complication.
Teachers assessed that student completion of the Networking standard had been generally
very successful in most dimensions except utilizing feedback from peers. In analyzing the
combination of posted interviews and peers’ comments on them-- the teachers indicated they saw
vast evidence of wide ranging increased civic participation and sharing of work for feedback.
Most students had selected original topics from the major historical events-- with often no more
than two doing the same topic. Teachers expressed surprise at the extension beyond the basic
suggested topics. In addition to several students 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy and President Obama
suggestions, students turned in a number of topics including: the Dove “real women” beauty
campaign; the Canadian school female student shootings; the Occupy Wall Street protests; police
brutality contrasting Rodney King and Eric Garner; the OJ Simpson Trial; the Boston Marathon;
and Chechnya violence. The teachers reflected that the myriad topics showcased students’
comfort in utilizing the digital tools for research and reflecting on a wider range of topics than
had been taught in the school. MM indicated that he was, “surprised that student comments were
so thoughtful,” which RR shared with the perception that, “Students who posted seemed to be
authentically reflecting on each other’s interviews” (MM & RR, personal communication,
January 15, 2015). Within this rubric standard, teachers did not find any evidence of students
using these comments to alter or enhance their portfolio, although RR (personal communication,
January 15, 2015) indicated he felt, “There really was no step built in for them to do that.”
School staff offered further evidence of the increased civic participation spoken about in
these three dimensions when the researcher was pulled aside during an on-site visit to meet with
the teachers for the grading reflection. The following are excerpted comments shared by two
158
central faculty members not directly involved in the project. One educator who worked with
literature courses, indicated:
It was so great to have kids walking around the school asking teachers, parents, and
people outside about modern history. The students who interviewed me were so
sensitive to me and asked politely if it was too sensitive to talk about. I know they were
asking P and J about events like 9/11 and everybody had the same experience. We were
excited to talk to the students and they seemed to really care...It was incredible watching
them discover the basics of what it means to do historian work.
Another faculty member working in administration at the school indicated:
I’m hearing really good things about the project around the school community. Some of
the students even came to interview me and M (also in administration). The coolest thing
was getting to watch some students like MM who interviewed me and other people about
9/11 and really felt like she was doing collegiate scholarly work investigating a topic she
selected and that really had meaning for her.
These reflections from school faculty suggest that the project engendered increased
communal discussion and outreach in the multiple phases of locating potential resources,
utilizing them as interview subjects, and following-up with them post-interview.
Teachers’ aggregate reflections on the seven Common Core State Standards rubric
categories found more that the student product had been more uneven. The teachers’
presentation of charts indicated their assessment that according to the rubric, students showed the
most strength with Technology to Dynamically Publish, Sustained Research, and
Comparing/Contrasting Sources which were labeled as standards A,C, and F on the rubric.
Within the area of A, the teachers found it evidentiary in the student interviews and
dialogic conversations sustained a demonstrate that each student had come up with an area of
inquiry or a research question which prompted them to located and vet specific interview
subjects. Although the teachers felt that students presented great specificity in this area, they
also felt that there was a lack of explicit stressing of the research question in a way that makes
the viewer sure what students original investigatory hypothesis or connection to the content.
159
“None of them stated it as a research question even though it was there in the interviews,”
observed RR (personal communication, January 15, 2015).
The evidence teachers showcased during the chart review also showcased that all students
who had completed the task included oral history content as the basis of their investigation
alongside basic research that met one dimension of comparing and contrasting sources. As per
the rubric standard of demonstrate a basic discernment in the ways in which their sources talked
about the topic and what the sources agreed about, students uniformly demonstrated the ability to
summarize in generalized ways to capture the gist. The teachers evaluated student work as
uneven applying Webb’s Depth of Knowledge wheel, with some students going to the depth of
knowledge of summary and others extending to inference or idea synthesis.
However, applying Will Richardson’s 2010 Spectrum of Blogging that was cited in the
students’ commenting standards-- few students sat at a 1-3. Many students met the transitional
4-5 standard as they deepened a description of their work and others. A decent number of
students extended their postings and commentary to a 6-8 level depth, offering comments that
provided a form of source analysis and building on previously stated material. Students did not
achieve a level of consistency with this.
Teachers felt that the finalized 1.5 analyzing scaffolds questions that modeled how to
analyze sources in a simple way were evidenced in a number of students’ works even though
adherence to the physical formatting was inconsistent- e.g. students generally did not label the
questions as two distinct reflections often merging them into an unlabeled prose paragraph.
The assessment of student work also showcased evidence of scaffold category F, the skill
to use Technology to Dynamically Publish social studies research, content, and writing. Beyond
the students who posted all required content, there were even more students who evidenced
160
signing into the knowledge management platform and posting comments or setting up the shell
of a page. In addition, students were able to make connection/hyperlinks between the Google
Drive and knowledge management Wikispaces to share large files. Student posting
demonstrated students’ capacity to use commenting Wiki features with which teachers had
previously reported no students being familiar.
Although not all students’ work captured the same level of detail, the mastery standard in
this category focused on students capturing their central themes. Their shared interview content,
readily accessible to hear and/or see on most student interview pages provided a very direct
sharing of big ideas, which were anchored by brief writing and commenting. The largest
evidence lacking in this area was any demonstration of a student’s running record. As a result,
the pages lacked a sense of process point details-- pivotal points in the investigation process
needed to fully meet this standard.
Aggregate findings from the sharing of work and teacher assessment were that students
struggled more to demonstrate Discipline Appropriate Claims/Forms, Analyzing Socio-Political
elements, and digitally presenting Informative/Explanatory Texts with Formatting.
In assessing rubric row D, the teachers presented evidence to suggest that students
showed only basic coverage of the discipline-specific claims. “All the portfolios had big themes
and most had a simple argument or statements of the event’s impact using their findings,” stated
RR. MM did not feel that students “made much use of graphics or formatting even though they
had easy access to images and online materials” (MM & RR, personal communication, January
15, 2015). Success was most present in the almost uniform use of video or sound files to support
or back up the basic claims made on their page.
161
The assessment of students’ context citations found they provided generally weak and
uneven documentation to demonstrate standard CCSS B- Analyzing Socio-Political. Many
students’ content page did not contain a section that broke down SPECS or applied a clear set of
social studies vocabulary. Teacher RR (personal communication, January 15, 2015) inquired,
“Can students have examples of what these actually look like when they’re written on a page?”
Teacher MM’s previously cited communications had also driven this home as a recurring theme
of the project, the need for simple exemplars.
Student work showed evidence of their efforts to meet CCSS Standard G- Gathering
Authoritative Sources without Plagiarizing. The breadth of their conducting of three interviews
and their writing, and/or posting content to two systems demonstrated a gathering and use of
authoritative sources. Students most demonstrated this standard through the selection of a
variety of classmate, parent, and faculty sources for this first go-- without an over-reliance on the
same interviewees. However, these student work pages offered almost no details of their
process- the running record issue also present in another standard. Teacher and research
conclusion was that increased inclusion of specific research stage decisions, findings, or linked
files would have offered a demonstration of this standard.
Among the least evidenced in the student work and teachers’ assessment was CCSS
standard E- Informative/Explanatory Texts with Formatting. Only the most basic aspect of this
standard was performed, with students having generated an informative text page with the basic
evidence of their research. This data best showcased the primary source interviews, but was
absent of cohesive demonstration of a clear formatting that was procedural. In addition, none of
the student choices showed their participation in sharing annotated or grabbed charts, images, or
excerpts from their research materials.
162
Based on these findings, two key premises were in place as a departure point for
generating scaffold changes to roll out the second iteration of the scaffolds. The first central
premise, was that the tweaking of scaffolds that occurred to produce the final 1.5 versions were
seen by teachers and used by students as jumping off point for meeting a number of project
requirements solidly-- 6 of the 10. In the four areas which students required the most additional
support for improvement-- there had been more previously detailed flux in the scaffold
development. When considering teachers’ final approvals of the 1.5 scaffolds to the areas of
student deficit, the research finding was that “simplified but procedural conceptual scaffolds”
were needed early (B. Schneider, personal communication, January 15, 2015). This caused as
design change that almost completely removed the inclusion of extra resources as anything other
than hyperlinks-- instead favoring bulleted lists and brief phrases to create an intellectual
checklist for conducting interview steps or analyzing the source materials and historical
implications.
The second major premise which dominated the design changes made in iteration two,
were the two common themes in the four areas in which students had the weakest performance.
First, students generally lacked a consistent formatting. The researcher interpreted teachers’
detailing of what was lacking as an imperative to offer clear procedural steps and literal
exemplar entries to show students an easy to understand example for each required piece of
writing.
The second theme in the areas of performance deficit was the lack of a process-oriented
or running record. Almost no student work showcased students’ reflections on their own
research process and many forgot to include the hyperlinks of secondary background research
even though their primary source interview questions generally showcased a thoughtful
163
preparation of questions. To this end, the research made a design change that presented the
entire reflection process of SPECS, Analyzing Sources, and Commenting as a more cohesive
procedural and outlined set of tasks both within the main VOR-SWAR assignment and the
enhanced scaffold with their additional sub-pieces.
To achieve this goal, a series of concrete document additions were made by depositing
these document pages onto the Wikispaces site seamlessly integrated as hyperlinked from the
VOR Assignment Hard Scaffold. The analysis of the first iteration scaffolds provided earlier
pointed out the need for materials that support students’ very direct sense of both procedure and
process. To that end, the newer scaffolds made increased use of bulleted and outline formatted
lists, as the researcher’s focus was to create enhanced conceptual scaffolding to support students’
understanding that the process should contain a more elaborated running record of the research
that speaks to the breadth of findings and researcher observations-- not just the oral history
interview. In that way, the new splash page or home page for the site in iteration two had only
19 lines of main directive text- 3 to introduce the topic, a 6-item set of conceptual process points
such as pre-researching the issue with SPECS context and Analyzing Sources, and a 10 item
checklist of the steps to complete a properly organized well rounded assignment. Two phrases
were at the bottom of the page offering a link for interview question planning and a link offer a
precise timeline planning page for those who feel like they need that specific guidance.
A quintessential benefit of the scaffolds being hosted to the students in a web-based
knowledge management platform like Wikispaces is that the older and newer scaffold content
could co-exist and be easily linked. As the new scaffolds were placed as the home page for the
site on January 21st, the first iteration scaffold content remained accessible from a link at the top
164
of the new homepage offering it to link them to the materials used to complete their first
assignment. The confidence that these materials remained, also served another function.
The coexistence of the files supported the design-based process by not requiring a
remaking of the wheel to create a physical handout that required cutting and pasting of old and
new materials together. Students were able to use the original materials to learn the basics of
uploading or downloading or commenting-- whether because they were late to the game in
completing only the second task or because they struggled the first time.
For several of the scaffold sub-pages, the findings suggested no need to make revisions--
e.g. students’ hosting of their files did not some to require additional information. The vast
majority of students in the class engaged with the online process, for example, several students
who did not complete their assignment and host their work had still folders and pages set up in
either the Google Drive or Wikispaces.
Although a review of work indicated that students in round one tended to record audio
files rather than video files, feedback from the teacher participants suggest that this was more
tied to teacher or student fears rather than technical issues challenges. RR indicated “I didn’t
know what to say when students were worried about whether the video could fit on their phone,”
while MM conveyed that, “I told them it was more important to do it with a file you feel you can
safely share” (MM & RR, personal communication, January 15, 2015). Although generating a
further document to easy social and emotional fears might be warranted in a final product, there
was no clear evidence at this point to suggest what that might cover.
Scaffolds were analyzed in a strengths-based manner that recognized areas where student
performance matched rubric outcomes, with enhancements made only to portions of scaffolds
that had not yielded strong performative student work as seen on the charts that follow.
165
Table 3.
Needs Assessment of Hard Scaffold Modifications for Iteration 2
Scaffold
Content Items
Rationale for Changes
Assignment
Sheet
The Activist Interview
digital assignment page
Aside from focusing on a slightly different
student task, the original assignment sheet
was assessed as packing in way too much
content on a single screen without
differentiating the most important tasks. A
lack of process-oriented observations and
steps in the resulting student work, also led to
redesigning the page with a 6-step portfolio
development process and a breakdown of 10
tasks needed to complete the project.
Hyperlinks to more detailed soft-scaffold
resources were placed at the bottom.
Rubric
No changes were necessary.
Table 4.
Needs Assessment of Soft Scaffold Modifications for Iteration 2
Scaffold
Content Items
Rationale for Changes
Gathering
Primary
Sources and
secondary
sources beyond
the classroom
New- Need Some Help
Planning Your Questions
for the Interview
New- Further Timeline
Breakdown- (If you need
our help…)
New- The Google Doc
Tips for a Good Oral
History
There was no need to repeat oral history best
practices documents as the links were still
locatable and provided access to detailed
information. A more succinct breakdown of key
questions/operational approaches to conducting
the interview was added through the new “Need
Some Help Planning Your Questions…” page
that was hyper-linked to the main project
assignment page.
To support an option for students who were
interested in a concrete timeline framed to
support envisioning the selection, coordination,
and documentation of their hour long interview,
a “Further Timeline Breakdown.”
An assignment sheet produced only digitally and
embedded directly into a scaffold (continued)
166
Scaffold
Content Items
Rationale for Changes
Presenting
Content in
Online Social
Environments
New- Class Activist
Interview Page
New- Putting on Your
SPECS for Context
New-Transcribing Key
Parts of the Interview
Our Class Page &
Developing Your Own
Using the Comment
Function
Two parts of this scaffold held effectively to
support students’ completion of requirements--
the portion on Editing Our Class Page &
Developing Your Own and the Using the
Comment Function pages.
The portion on “Offering Context/SPECS” was a
portion of the scaffold that had heavy changes
DURING the first iteration due to a large number
of diffuse questions to answer and a lack of clear
strategies to apply these questions to the specific
research in question. In addition to revising this
section completely into a succinct format, an
example of well-written SPECS context was
offered.
A completely new page on “Transcribing Key
Parts of the Interview” was added to provide
students another strategy to break-down the
process-oriented thought on their research.
Offering
Online
Analysis of
Researched
Work
New- Reflecting on Your
Sources for Agreement &
Argument
New- Making Robust
Comments
This scaffold required multiple changes
DURING the first iteration-- including a
temporary reduction in the number of comments
due to the perceived overwhelming amount of
content on the page and multiple edits in the
Analyzing your Sources page.
The newer pages replace the long-form version
of both pages with succinct descriptions and a
more explicit approach. In addition, an example
of quality work was added to each.
Adjusting the hard scaffolds: VOR assignment sheet. The VOR Assignment Sheet for
the second iteration was released as a digital document on January 19th with only three elements:
a five sentence intro explaining the vision of the project; a list of the Wikispaces Personal Web
Page portfolio content students needed to include with clarifying descriptive phrases labeled a-f;
and a Checklist of Things to Complete for the Activist Interview Project with 10 imperative verb
167
actions required and a descriptive page about each. As such it was placed as the home page to the
site-- anchoring even more centrally as the built pedagogy for the project.
The first iteration assignment sheet was distributed as a paper copy, and led with one
page of narrative description of the projects’ goals, one page of timeline of 12-15 steps broken
up by a series of dates, and one page of nineteen before, during, and after interview steps. The
original assignment sheet continued with the oral history release form and a copy of the soft
scaffold materials on oral history best practices.
In the second iteration, the form walks them through the need to start with a SPECS
context write up, then an interview upload, then a transcription of key quotables, then an analysis
of sources, then 10 total back and forth comments, and the face-to-face culminating exhibition.
By front-loading these as the six things your personal portfolio page will include, students are
provided a literal rubric as to what sections must be present on the page and in what order. This
also addresses the previously identified issue of process. This format eschews the vast timeline
of the steps and the micro-tasks, instead trusting that students who need a temporal break down
can click on the bottom of the page to the Further Timeline Breakdown (if you need help to
schedule envision getting all this done. The subtle but important change is that the steps have
been ordered to reflect the procedural which maximizes what the project asks for-- context
before interviewing with documenting of sources, notation of key findings, and reflections on
their own and each other’s assessment of the sources and findings. Students are thereby given
concrete choices to work in a manner that will line up with how the project expects the work to
be presented-- they have scaffolding to think about things in the order which they are expected to
experience them and benefit from the inductive learning process.
168
Likewise, the second iteration hard scaffold replaces the nineteen very interview specific
steps with ten bulleted steps that each have a bolded imperative verb urging students to pick their
activist, create the class page link, call the activist, collect research, interview the activist,
digitize/upload, transcribe, populate their page, make comments, and show off their work in
class. Instead of the checklist approach in version one where the list was predicated on
supporting the interview-- this list more directly walks students through the wider range of tasks
they would need to complete to accurately perform the first six pieces of reflection. In this
second iteration, the concrete scaffolding immediately follows the conceptual scaffolding.
Students are given a simple framework for what they should be exploring as they do the work,
and then they are provided the task procedural order that will help them there.
The VOR Assignment page also followed suite from all the scaffolds that experienced a
vast simplification in the 1.5 phase. Instead of opening a dialogue with students on the values,
virtues, and ideal pacing for the project to ensure on-time completion, it instead focuses students
on having the clearest picture of the tasks that they must complete. “Links to scaffolds that help
with timeline or questioning are readily available at the bottom of this digital document-- they
are available but not assumed as central to what every student will feel they need to know” (B.
Schneider, 2015a, January 10, 2015, “Assignment Page”).
Adjusting the hard scaffold: VOR-SWAR rubric. The VOR SWAR rubric was not
edited or reshaped at this point in the process, as it was intended from the start to remain in the
same form. Teachers had already used it to assess areas in which students likely needed more
scaffolded support. The rubric remained a guideline and had a link at the bottom of the page.
Adjusting the soft scaffold: how to collect & organize primary and secondary sources
beyond the classroom. As described in the introduction to the second iteration scaffold changes,
169
the focus shifted from expositional vision statements to procedural conceptual scaffolds. In this
particular scaffold, the first iteration items were filled an overage of conceptual details about high-
quality work. Although it used bulleted formats at points, there were often multiple nested layers
to the list.
Based on the repeated concerns that arose necessitating the 1.5 version, it seemed clear
that participant teachers felt most connected to the students when they felt that the steps and
vision were boiled into discrete actionable bullets.
The iteration one scaffold had incorporated oral history best practices from two different
handouts in their lengthy full form providing over four pages of text without highlighting the
steps that this particular project wanted students to most engage. In the first iteration this
appeared at the end of the paper VOR Assignment sheet-- making that scaffold piece lengthier
too. By the digital Mini-Interview page that comprised this soft scaffold in its 1.5 form, the link
offered the combo of the seventeen item Tips for a Good Oral History checklist and links to the
two documents from UC Berkely and The American Folklife Center.
This second iteration version of the scaffold anchors itself in the heavily simplified VOR
Assignment Sheet recently described-- with its extremely limited expository introduction and
limited bulleted comments directing students’ chief organizing thoughts with an eye toward
conceptual scaffolding. The first portion scaffolds a clear vision of what content must appear
on the student’s Wikispaces personal assignment page for the assignment to be considered
complete and well done. Likewise, the checklist contained immediately below breaks down 10
imperatively phrased tasks that constitute a completely thorough process for project completion.
In this same vein, two hyperlinks at the bottom of this page direct students to
supplementary materials that share the boiled down format of the main page. These two
170
hyperlinks are labeled Need Some Help Planning Your Questions for Your Interview? and
Further Timeline Breakdown (if you need our help to schedule envision getting all this done).
The interview preparation sheet eschews the full handouts of oral history-- instead
leading students to a six-question outlined list that focuses students on the key tasks/challenges.
The imperatively phrased verbs that serve as the heading for each of the six, stress the use of
evocative questions, pre-written interviewer notes, biographical to topical shifts, use of articles
and videos as reflection pieces for the interviewee, and asking clarifying questions before
shifting topics. In the third item on the list introducing the strategy of shifting from personal
biographical to historical topical, provides students four usable prompts that could apply to
almost every interviewee. In this iteration, the oral history details are more concise and concrete.
The timeline breakdown link similarly provides students nine steps that walk students
through key procedures that will assist in them having process-oriented activities to talk about.
From selecting their interviewee from the class document, to pre-interviewing them and using
the data to find articles and online video, students are given more direct urging to gather and
capture their work with a range of sources over a period of time. The format breaks down four
key dates within the two-week period that students may want to apply as their time benchmarks
for completing/submitting specific work.
Adjusting the soft scaffold: Adjusting the Google doc. One of the biggest concerns
raised by MM throughout the research process was conveyed by his repeated request regarding
assurances that students could connect easily with interviewees immediately after the student was
ready to start their project. After having assessed the first iteration work, it was clear that students
were willing to go out and speak to people in their extended school circle, such as their teachers,
other students’ parents, their own families, and their classmates. In the first iteration of this
171
scaffold that was meant to help students conceptually organize their activities, there was no defined
portion of the site through which students could capture their decision-making process around
interview subjects.
In an original design element, students would have been asked to develop a Pinterest
image board to capture key information about their interview subjects. As time came to
incorporate lessons learned from iteration one, MM’s comments were taken as a reason to look
for the inclusion of just such a communal space where student participants could know that work
was happening. As part of the scaffold redesign vision for iteration two, a stated goal by the
researcher was, “Offering a communal Google Sheet where the larger pool of activists that
school families know from the outside world are listed, lets students take on the role of
explorers-- but with a map to all of their particular community’s social capital and human
resources” (B. Schneider, personal communication, January 17, 2015). This intent speaks to a
sense of agency— the capacity of the student participants to see themselves as having decision-
making power and as having confidence in their understanding of the big picture enough that
they feel safe to take action.
During the first iteration, students could only discover the breadth of interview topics and
obtain a sense of who had been interviewed after all their classmates work had been posted,
which in many ways mimics a more traditional non-digital classroom. For the second iteration
of this scaffold, students gained the capacity to interact with each other and their teachers around
the interview subjects. Much like the other changes in this scaffold, the second iteration content
responds to the data that pointed out student’s pronounced lack of process-oriented writing by
exposing more clearly the procedural steps.
172
The teacher participants engaged with this shared document quickly and took ownership.
Both MM and RR placed a frantic email or call after the Google Sheet went live to ensure that
they knew how to manipulate the cart and add columns to support creating a space where
students could write in who they wanted to work with. The interactive nature of this access
parallels the interactive posting and commenting tasks that will follow. This second iteration
also further pushes the Jenkins (2009) new media literacies by providing a wider range of places
in which students need to be meeting and sharing with each other and playing with product of
their adult community’s network and collective intelligence. As the Google doc included spaces
for students to learn about their subjects and prospective topics, spaces for students to request
interview access, and spaces to document final interview decisions-- all participants completing
the interview assignment were engaged in collective thought work and networking.
Adjusting the soft scaffold: sharing your research digitally. In its first iteration, this
scaffold provided students videos, screen images, and step-by-step directions regarding the process
of uploading and downloading their interview files and linking these files into the Wikispaces
pages. Students participating in the first iteration had shared their files into the Google drive
spaces and successfully linked their audio or video files to their Wikispaces pages. Although
more students had submitted audio files rather than video files, teachers shared that students’
choice to do so was more about the comfort with the memory space available on their devices, and
not about the concrete choices or skills needed in their upload of files. As a result of this
assessment, this scaffold was not changed for the second iteration. Students retained access to the
original materials due to the entire version one scaffolds remaining accessible through a link on
the main page to the Mini-Interview project assignment.
173
Adjusting the soft scaffold: Presenting interactive content in online social
environments. As described earlier in the chapter, the original intent of this scaffold was to
support students in establishing their online presence through the creation of a personal page for
their work, providing the know-how to post on classmates’ pages, and defining what context
should appear on their own page to demonstrate their research and findings. This scaffold
originally was comprised of three web pages-- Own Page, Using the Comment Function, and
Offering Context of Your Interview Using SPECS.
As described earlier, teachers’ analysis of student work showcased a lack of consistency
in the usage of these SPECS guidelines, similar to other guidance on sub-sections that scaffolded
students’ analysis of their own work. Changes for iteration two were held to the test of
minimalism, a need fully established during iteration 1.5.
The first portion of the original scaffold had been the file Own Page, a document
provided students a breakdown of how to add their name to a class page, create their own
portfolio page, and hyperlink the two. This document had led students through 16 steps and
made use of 25 screen capture images. Linking to the class page and establishing pages of their
own, were successfully completed by all students who had completed the work steps involved in
the project, and by two additional students who had provided minimal content after the due date.
Based on a lack of evidence that neither additional content nor minimalist clarity was needed,
there were no changes made to this scaffold. A link to the original Own Page was added to the
new assignment page/main page as a main action list directing them to use a parallel process and
make a personal page for their interview linked to the Class Activist Interview Page. Instead of
the original assignment where students had to add their name alone, they were asked to complete
a line of an inserted table, providing the name of their interview subject and their history teacher.
174
The original Using the Comment Function was a step-by-step breakdown of commenting
that included both technical details and described an intent of constructive comments to help
others.
The original format made use of five concrete steps and seven screen-capture images. It
is also worth noting that this scaffold can only be directly accessed through a link in the
Standards for Commenting page within the Offering Online Analysis for Researched Work
scaffold. The analysis of students’ work established that student comments/posts reflected that
students had integrated the skills to perform the task. No changes were made in this sub-section
of the scaffold.
The two sub-sections which represented the largest changes were the revised Putting on
Your SPECS and the new Transcribing Key Parts of Your Interview. Both of these sets of
changes were made to address the lack of consistency in students’ presentational output by
addressing the teacher-expressed concerns that examples needed to be made available.
The original SPECS page was accessible from the main page of the Mini-Interview
assignment as a link labeled, “2. Provide context by writing your SPECS Analysis following the
project expectations model” (B. Schneider, 2015a, January 10, “SPECS Analysis”). Although
this format gives it a primary placement as the second task due to complete on January 15, the
phrasing creates a potentially confusing linkage in which the SPECS emerge as a potentially new
project expectation that differs from the descriptive expectations or the concrete expectations that
had been described on other links on the page. In addition, the SPECS page indicated that
students should,
REFER-- Put the link to EACH of your research sources on your wiki page. For articles,
this means using the URL or your articles and ensuring that your videos are linked into
the page.
175
THEN-- WRITE A SPECS ANALYSIS OF THE ISSUES/EVENTS YOU ARE
STUDYING (B. Schneider, 2015a, January 10, “SPECS Page”)
The page expands on the five dimensions that comprise SPECS- social, political, economic,
cultural, and spatial/geographic. The original document had 13 questions spread out among
these five dimension, including:
• What racial/ethnic/class/gender groups were especially impacted or involved in the
events leading up to, during, or following this topic?
• Who were the most important political figures involved in this topic?
• What political movements or events helped lead up to this topic/event? (B.
Schneider, 2015a, January 10, “SPECS Page”
As these three examples from the thirteen show, many of the questions were phrased in
ways that might require extensive responses. Following the lessons learned from the 1.5
iteration, an effort was made to simplify the modeling to maximize students’ likelihood to use
and apply it as a standard-bearer for responses. The new version of the page reduced the content
from the SPECS questions that might apply to all social studies learning, to an applied model
that is more specific to community-based research.
The new version asked students to write a two to three paragraph summary detailing,
Places, Key People and events, and Power and positions. The questions posed to clarify these
three areas applied more to the histories they were hearing asking how key players spoke to the
press, what they disagree over, who was in power, and over what laws or proposals they were
fighting.
A completely new element was added to the page in the form of a Sample SPECS
background context to be included on your Activist Interview Personal Page, which then
proceeded to provide a three-paragraph model based on neighborhood gentrification. The
176
sample paragraphs modeled a way for students to summarize the researched they had done while
embedding hyperlinks to the articles, broadcast television, and Youtube historical videos they
had found. The final sentence of the sample demonstrated a transition that described the
interview subject’s link to the overarching issue. In addition to providing students a brief
sample, a change was made in the content of the hyperlink which draws the user back to the
home page. The phrase, “You've completed this portion of the assignment-- return to the
assignment page for the next section,” (B. Schneider, 2015b, January 21, “Sample SPECS
background context) was placed at the bottom of the page as the home link to offer a
motivational response that also carries the sensibility that this SPECS section is one of multiple
process-oriented documenting steps.
To carry on that sensibility, the scaffold sub-section “Transcribing Key Parts of the
Interview,” was added. The first two sentences on the page clarified that there was no request
for students to type out the entire interview. The page gave two very concrete steps for students
to complete in order to meet the transcribing requirement:
A SUMMARY DESCRIPTION of the interview subject's autobiographical account of
the activism-- that includes less than 2 paragraphs of writing-- subject bio, interview
description, and topics covered,” and three (3) to five (5) KEY PARAPHRASES/
QUOTABLES from the interview that you personally believe to be important indicating
at what time during the interview they happened. (B. Schneider, 2015b, “Transcribing
Key Parts of the Interview”)
A precise example was given for each of these from an actual oral history which the page
hyper-linked and cited from a California State University at Long Beach oral history site. This
page ended with the same affirming ending as the revised SPECS page and offered students a
clear and more manageable picture of what is to be expected in this section.
Adjusting the soft scaffold: Offering online analysis of researched work. This final
scaffold drew its original intent as a support to assist students in critical reflection on their own
177
sources and research, as well as that of their peers. In the first iteration, this was done through
discrete pages on Analyzing Sources and Standards for Commenting. In their original formats, as
described earlier, both documents were lengthy containing many source material items that were
meant to provide students a graduate-school level of content affirming the hows and whys of
completing these tasks. The teacher feedback produced during the 1.5 stage stressed the feedback
that even the strongest secondary students prized the specificity and simplicity, over the range of
resources. These 1.5 changes brought the Analyzing Sources document first into an eight-question
draft and then into a two-question format that focused students chiefly to assess sources for
agreement or disagreement. The Standards for Commenting page also transformed from a wide-
reaching range of documents on the value of constructive commenting in social media into a two-
step statement of expectations around posting and a two-screen image example of a constructive
comment.
Despite these changes, the teachers’ evaluation of student work between the iterations
showcased a lack of content and consistency in these areas. In addition, when held up to the
rubric standards, the student work primarily showcased the new media literacies categories,
rather than the Common Core State Standards expectations regarding analysis and presentation
of research, sources, and thesis arguments. During the teacher presentation of their evaluation of
the work, RR (personal communication, January 15, 2015) had commented, “Students didn’t
really have enough preparation or time to focus on the other resources besides the interview
disagreed,” As a result of the original pages not yielding the desired results, both were altered to
address these issues using the same techniques and sensibilities present in the other iteration two
scaffolds.
178
The iteration two page Reflecting on Your Sources for Agreement & Argument, had
roughly the same length as its original counterpart. Despite the similar lengths, the nature of the
content changed radically. First, all citations and references to others’ models for analysis were
dropped to conserve space. This meant the hyperlinks on the bottom of the original page
providing access to detailed techniques for document analysis were dumped so as to not provide
any distraction from the specific process elements which students needed to complete.
Second, the original request for a sophisticated and concise paragraph with two questions
on corroboration versus counterargument was replaced by a completely different format. In this
iteration, the directions provide four questions that students are directed to answer in the form of
a paragraph. These questions are copied below:
• How do my sources agree?;
• Do my sources support an ‘historical argument?’;
• Are there things in the interview that people can say offer an ‘alternative historical
interpretation’?;
• Do I find anything in the interview or resources that address and dismiss this
alternative argument? (B. Schneider, 2015b, “Reflecting on Your Sources for
Agreement and Argument”).
The change made in the focus of these questions was done to better align them with the
expectations on the VOR-SWAR rubric categories that addressed Common Core State
Standards. These changes also focus the student to reflect more specifically on the thesis
arguments and counterarguments present in the sources rather than trying to pull apart the details
on which they disagree. To address RR’s previously expressed concern about students’
179
preparation to engage in counter-arguments-- this version of the questions highlights the degree
to which counter-arguments can be interpreted as offering an alternative historical explanation.
Third, the second iteration page provided a detailed exemplar that continued the
hypothetical topic and research used as an example on the second iteration SPECS page. Aside
from detailing how comments on their own research can be brought into a review of the sources,
the example also modeled how a basic but clear argument and counterargument could function.
Using a gentrification example, and points that the sources’ agreement on city policies being
responsible for gentrification could be challenged by an argument like creative types simply aged
out and moved away. This was done to illustrate how one might extract an alternative
explanation from their research process and logical thinking. Like the other second iteration
pages, this one also contains a hyperlink that praises their completion of another section and
directs them to use the link to complete their final task.
That final task was contained on the page Making Robust Comments. The second
iteration page was not that different in length or its use of screen images. In the second iteration
the content changed from a focus on the reasons why posting is important to clarification of the
task before them and increase of expectations. The original iteration of the page had experienced
a major decrease in quantity of posting as teacher feedback resulted in changes between the
iteration one and 1.5 versions. Based on student work showing an amount of posting that the
participating teachers found notable, a decision was made by the researcher to return the posting
requirements to their original levels but to provide more concrete expectations on where students
were to focus their commenting attention.
The second iteration page clarified two themes that were not present in the original-- that
students needed a diversity of responses and that these responses needed to address a diversity of
180
students’ process-oriented reflections. The first iteration placed students’ requirements as
commenting on the SPECS content, whereas this iteration required students to reflect on SPECS,
transcript, and source analysis sections. On the new version of the page, this direction was
included both in the short description of the task at the top of the page, and in an offering of three
hints. The hint section suggests that students make notes to themselves while watching other
students’ work and offers the concept of parsing out the comments in a pre-planned assignment
of one, two, or three comments toward a given section.
The second iteration pages ends with two reminders-- the first that students should not
restrict their comments to a short portion of others’ content and the second that students should
recognize they have completed the requisite portions of this project and should prepare for
exhibitions.
Post-Research Interview with Participant Teachers
Approximately five weeks after completing the research activities, on March 17, 2015 an
interview session was conducted with the two teacher participants. As a data source, the
interview of participant teachers was aimed at gaining some confirmatory information regarding
trends or concerns. Based on the participants’ limited availability after several reschedules, a
single interview session was held during which each of the two participants answered all
interview questions, alternated turns at who answered a question first.
The questions had been provided in printed form to the participants who were able to
review them and look at their sheet while being asked the questions. The interview was recorded
in its entirety as a digital voice memo via cell phone and shared into an iTunes format file. The
interview questions focused on two main aspects of the participants’ experience-- the ways in
181
which the project represented new territory for them and their students and the ways in which the
scaffold tools supported the development of researcher targeted areas.
The Pedagogical and Personal Change Experience
During the March 17, 2015 post research interview, both the teacher participants
expressed that their past experiences with technology in the history classroom had been more
limited to using to listen to files on oral history websites, to video their neighborhood walk-
throughs, and to sending kids to work with blog sites. Although teacher RR said he would,
“describe myself as a general technophobe,” RR (personal communication, March 17, 2015) he
felt that during the project he had “become familiar with platforms...things I had never heard of
before...even though I still have a ways to go in terms of mastering them,” (March 17, 2015).
In addition to personal growth around technology, both described pedagogical growth
through this project-- in seeing that students could be successfully asked to share their digital
work, comment on each other’s findings, interact with scaffolds, and engage in iterative work
themselves. The theme of surprise at students’ willingness to respond in robust ways to each
other’s work came up during the interviews in response to multiple questions. RR had identified
that this digital technique was new to him.
During the interview, RR expressed the newness of seeing how online environments can
be used to capture the research and writing efforts, “I don’t think I’ve done a project like this
where everyone in the class had to do a primary source interview and where almost all of the
ways they’ve shared what they learned are online” (RR, personal communication, March 17,
2015).
RR found this project to enhance previous years’ versions of the project in this class--
adding in the capability for students to showcase their audio/video work with textual elements in
182
a forum where they could share the work during the project rather than solely to the teacher or
only at a presentation event. He also cited the project as different because it was “organized with
scaffolding around what they were asked to do and when they were asked to do it.” (RR,
personal communication, March 17, 2015). He also commented that an iterative process that
included the “mini-interview” for students to get experienced with the tasks was a new element
in terms of his experiences with project design.
As the interview questions turned toward the nature of the tools provided, the teachers
both expressed surprise at what they termed students’ dismissive attitude regarding working with
new digital platforms for academic purposes. RR expressed his own feelings of being
overwhelmed with the originally proposed five platforms-- concerned that his limited exposure
to the tools led to feelings of intimidation when he needed to review pros and cons with them.
He also described the feeling that “even if students didn’t know them, they had more of a feel of
how they could be used better than I” (RR, personal communication, March 17, 2015). He
described this as tying into his surprise at student’s immediate dismissal of the options.
On the other hand, RR expressed that it is precisely this question that has followed him
through different classes and of which he remains critical. He wondered openly during the
interview if anyone had found the key that opened the door to the vastness of resources and
content on the web in a manner that would let them bridge students’ use of web sites and digital
social media from the social to the academic.
He imagined that such know how would, “help kids make that leap where they think of it
like something that’s not ‘oh no, I just do that with my friends for fun,’ or they like you know
make judgements about certain sites and are like, ‘Nah, I’m not doing that!’ and that’s my
world” (RR, personal communication, March 17, 2015). In evaluating this research project, MM
183
indicates that he thinks there were moments where “some of the kids did make use of the website
and listened to more of each other’s work than if it was not online and some commented on each
other’s work.” He wondered openly whether “academically safe” (MM, personal
communication, March 17, 2015) Facebook spaces existed for students to engage in this kind of
work.
He feels that some students may have not embraced the process because of teacher roll
out and the initial number of requested online activities. However, he also expressed the feeling
that Wikispaces might not have housed enough excitement figuratively and use of applets.
During both pedagogical student engagement questions and technology tools questions, he
shared his belief that students have become so comfortable with the embedded video
functionality of sites like Youtube and Facebook, that “to have to read through the material
without the flash felt onerous,” and may have lacked what he describes as the “intuitive design”
(MM, personal communication, March 17, 2015) that he believes adolescents have come to
expect universally.
All of RR and MM’s concerns during the March 17, 2015 interview, speak to the TPACK
issues that are the focus of this research. RR’s feelings highlight several fears that often arise
around alignment when teaching with technology-- the anxiety over one’s understanding of the
technology itself, the questions regarding aligning the technology with the teaching strategies,
and the concerns over how to appropriately modify or adjust the project. MM’s concerns
highlight the alignment challenges when high school teachers are focused on inspiring students
with technology. He wonders about techniques he can apply in his pedagogy to help bridge
students’ biases regarding the surface qualities of different technological tool’s affordances.
184
The Scaffolds Strengths & Challenges
When asked about the scaffolds themselves, the teachers seemed to find great value in the
technological supports they provided-- with RR feeling that initial scaffolds favored explaining
the technology know how rather than the writing content and with RR and MM feeling that
elements like the help video were completely new ideas to him about how to incorporate how to
tasks and that they combined with the screen image directions were “particularly helpful” (MM
& RR, personal communication, March 17, 2015) and impactful on the students. Both teachers
cited this as enhancing the dimension of students’ abilities to utilize multimedia inside
explanatory or instructional texts, with one stating, “We didn’t spend class time on it, so to the
extent that it happened, online tools were responsible” (MM & RR, personal communication,
March 17, 2015).
Both teachers found the scaffolds and digital tools helpful in supporting students through
the location and use of expert sources-- in this case primary source interviews with human
participants. RR felt that the inclusion of a digital shared database of potential activist interview
subjects in the second iteration “helped create efficiency and confidence” (RR, personal
communication, March 17, 2015). On the other hand, MM (personal communication, March 17,
2015) saw the techniques and structuring of interview skills as most enhancing the project,
saying “the interviews were the strongest for me, and from what I heard on the interviews they
were very engaged, and they had great conversations, and they came back very excited about that
and what you gave them, some of that really rubbed off.”
Despite thinking that not all students made full use of the materials due to factors like
time crunch, the teachers agreed that the laid out examples in the second iterations were very
185
clear, with RR stating that “if a kid read through everything, it was very laid out for them what
we wanted them to do” (RR, personal communication, March 17, 2015).
Both teachers also shared a common feeling that the scaffolding was an asset in
supporting students’ understanding of the social studies concepts and skills. RR said he was
pleased with the samples provided to students in the scaffolds and with the students’ resulting
work on these areas of their research. MM felt that the iterative process created for student
participants of doing the Mini-Interviews and then the Activist Interviews offered students
practice and allowed so that “we could give them feedback on if they weren’t doing enough or
they misinterpreted what one of those areas were about...We were clear with them without
overburdening them with some specific questions about what SPECS means” (MM, personal
communication, March 17, 2015).
When asked to reflect on the extent to which the scaffolds and process supported
students’ documentation of a running record of their work process, the teachers were at first both
expressing concern about how explicit and front and center reference citations were presented.
Through direct comments on the confusion they felt students had with two distinct pages
for each phase of the project, they suggested that a singular page per student would have better
highlighted students’ research phases for both themselves and the students.
RR reflected that he believed students demonstrated more clarity in their presentation of
the audio/video interview and related comments than on portraying their research on the page.
As both of them examined the idea of running record, they shifted their answers toward looking
at both the comments and citations on students’ pages. RR shared that, “commenting on each
others’ work helped highlight their arguments” (RR, personal communication, March 17, 2015).
