As an undergraduate science major, I came to understand quantitative data; we measured what we observed in the laboratory and in the field and we summarized and evaluated it to draw conclusions about the world as we saw it. Patterns in numbers were our window into the systems we studied. As a graduate student in Read More
Category: Using Data
Experience in Education: A Lesson on Consistent Thinking
Twenty years ago, I was working towards my master’s degree at the local state college. Several fo the faculty were qualitative researchers, and they shared that part of their work with their graduate students. As a “science guy,” I had experience with quantitative data, so the methods unfamiliar to me. Over time, I explored the Read More
The Application of Technology Acceptance to Educational Design
In 2016, I delivered this paper at the Annual Conference of the New England Education Research Organization. Full paper Abstract Despite a long history of computers in schools, many educators continue to struggle with the problem of creating effective technology-rich learning environments. In this exploratory research, documents collected as several K-12 schools designed systems to Read More
What Stephen Jay Gould Wrote about Change
Scientific discoveries are deep, difficult and complex. They require a rejection of one view of reality (never an easy task, either conceptually or psychologically), in favor of a radically new order, teeming with consequences for everything held precious. One does not discard the comfort and foundation of a lifetime suddenly or lightly. Moreover, even if Read More
On the Ethics of Data Collection in Education
I stumbled across this selection from a work iI wrote about five years ago…. it still seems to apply: A part of all education research is recognizing one’s responsibility to proceed in a manner that respects the subjects, the process, and the community. Ethical researchers do not endanger the physical or emotional health of subjects, Read More
Use-Inspired Research
This is an excerpt from Efficacious Technology Management: a Guide for School Leaders In 1997, Donald Stokes suggested designing a project to be one type of research does not prevent one from doing the other type, so the dichotomy of pure and applied research is misleading. According to Stokes, many researchers seek to create new Read More
TPCK: A Framework for IT Planning in Schools
Teacher education has traditionally been informed by a framework comprising the content dimension (what is to be taught or the curriculum) and the pedagogy dimension (how it is taught or instruction). Shulman (1987) suggested teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge cannot be developed in isolation, so he proposed “pedagogical content knowledge” (PCK) to describe the Read More
Three Questions about Assessment
These ideas are further supported in Technology in Support of Diverse Assessment which was prepared for the 2017 AECT Annual Conference. “Assessment” has been an important aspect of teaching and learning (or perhaps more accurately, it has been a buzzword garnering much attention) for most of my career in education. Advocates for many positions (political as much Read More
Technology Acceptance– Understanding Decisions to Use IT
This except is from my book Efficacious Technology Management: A Guide for School Leaders Technology acceptance model was first elucidated to understand the observation “that performance gains are often obstructed by users’ unwillingness to accept and use available systems” (Davis, 1989 p. 319), and it has been used to study decisions to use (or avoid) Read More
Educational Design Research: An Emerging Planning Tool
Schools are institutions that leaders seek to improve. They take actions so that operations are more efficient; they take actions so that outcomes are more closely aligned with goals than they currently are. They also take actions so that new goals are achieved. Whether the improvements are meant to reform operations (make them more efficient Read More