A New Age in Education?

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Have We Really Moved Beyond the Age of Behaviorism in K-12?

@joe_edtech

Every once in a while in my doctoral program I run across an article that I can't help but share with people, especially my teacher friends. Last night I read "The Impact of Technology and Theory on Instructional Design Since 2000," which is actually a chapter out of a larger work entitled Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology (full citation below).

Hold your yawns. I know it doesn't sound very exciting to anyone other than disciples of Instructional Technology like myself, but there are some really interesting claims in this article. I think this is a discussion worth having with educators across the curriculum, and maybe with some of our national "leaders" in educational policy as well.

In the article, the authors suggest that we have already gone through "Four Ages of Educational Technology," and they are, "the Age of Instructional Design, the Age of Message Design, the Age of Simulation, and the Age of Learning environments" (p. 89). In the "Age of Instructional Design," the first and supposedly defunct age, 

focused mainly on content creation, was based on behaviorist and cognitivist theories of learning. Learning was perceived as simply a change in behavior or cognitive structure or both with instruction designed to effectively transfer knowledge to the learner...This included the mechanisms of scientific management emphasis and focused on both standardization and increasing learning efficiency through content and task analysis. (p. 90)

I take no issue with the fact that most educators recognize the description above as largely outdated thinking. However, I don't believe the American Education system has moved on from this kind of "industrial age" model of teaching and learning. For instance, doesn't the above describe perfectly American workplace training modules? And more importantly, despite the claim that we are teaching skills instead of content, doesn't the standardized testing required under NCLB mean that it is impossible for school systems to move too far away from this Mid-Twentieth Century model? I'd love to say that Common Core tests will move beyond this out dated thinking, but in the most optimistic statement I've made in 2014, that is yet to be seen.

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What do you think? Is the author right? Have we entered a new Age of Ed Tech?

Warren, S. J., Lee, J., & Najmi, A. (2014). The impact of technology and theory on instructional design since 2000. In J.M. Spector, M.D. Merril, J. Elen, M.J. Bishop (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. (pp. 89-99). doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3185-5