Putting the Ed in Ed Tech

For Ed Dieterle, a fifth-year HGSE doctoral student, technology in the classroom may be the secret ingredient that turns a bad student good.  And the River City Project is helping to prove this to be true. As part of his dissertation research, Dieterle investigates the psychosocial aspects of learning and teaching with technology.  One of his primary research goals is to better understand students’ media-based learning styles.

Working with Professor Christopher Dede on River City – an interactive computer simulation of a late 1800s river town – Dieterle examines how different types of media and interfaces shape and change the way students think about material as they learn.  The program has the look and feel of a video game, but it supports the learning of scientific inquiry and method; students learn to think like scientists as they help the town determine why residents of River City are becoming sick.  While implementing the program in diverse schools across the country, Dieterle has observed students who are otherwise failing turn into star science students.

“One of the things I noticed in talking with teachers and students [that are using River City in their classrooms] is this idea that some students have written themselves off as not being able to do science and succeed in schools,” he says. “These students seem to find themselves in River City. My question is why can a student with a poor academic history suddenly overcome through River City?”

So far, Dieterle speculates that part of what makes the River City experience life-changing for students is personal preferences for thinking and learning. “Some students have different ways to think about things, do things, and different preferences in the tools they like to use to accomplish this,” he says. “I’m testing whether preferences and use of abilities predict how well someone might do in an innovation like River City.”

His research studies about 800 middle school students from across the U.S. and Canada and reveals that the majority of 13-years-olds are highly connected to interactive media. He estimates that more than 57 percent of the students use the Internet at home either once or several times a day, 59 percent own a mobile phone, 74 percent own an MP3 player, and 69 percent own a handheld game player.

Ultimately, through his research, Dieterle hopes to help educators discover better instruments and measures to capture students who like to think and learn in immersive technologies to the point where learning goes beyond sitting in front of a computer accessing the Internet to actually building a digital character through simulations. In addition, he foresees his research impacting the way students learn 21st century skills — a hot subject for educators today. “Ed’s research is helping us to understand the influence of media on students’ learning styles and preferences, which is vital knowledge for 21st century instructional design,” Dede says.