We must establish a pedagogical base for the effective use of Internet learning. We need a vastly expanded, revitalized, and reconfigured educational research, development, and innovation program, one built on a deeper understanding of how people learn, and how new tools support and assess learning gains.

Compare research in medicine and sports with research in education.

In medical research, cumulative, aggregated protocols, involving practitioners and patients, together with well-coordinated and publicized clinical trials, have led to treatments that enhance the health and extend the life span of many people. Technology has been central to studying diseases, to finding new solutions that address them, and to disseminating research results to medical practitioners and the public. Increasingly, technology has empowered an educated patient population to demand the best treatments. In short, research has made it possible to enhance health.

Sports research offers another example. Research employing new technologies has made it possible to enhance performance in athletics. Research on new designs and materials in golf clubs, skis, and bicycles, as well as new training feedback mechanisms (e.g., video replay), allows professional athletes and weekend sports enthusiasts to attain new levels of performance. Research using the latest technologies has made it possible to enhance athletic performance.

Educational research, focused on using long-term, longitudinal studies as well as aggregated short-term trials supported by technology, should be directed at enhancing performance in learning.

We know that technology offers both the impetus and the opportunity to vastly improve learning performance.1 Without a vigorous, dynamic research base, however, we will miss the opportunity to advance the state of the art and science of education.

Educational research suffers from three major problems-

Not enough money is spent on educational research

Educational research often does not support enhanced learning performance

Educational research often is not accessible to teachers or easily
translated into practice

Not Enough is Spent on Educational Research

Consider these comparisons between the private sector and the educational sector:

· The U.S. Department of Commerce reports that "Between 1994 and 1999, total U.S. R & D investment increased at an average annual (inflation adjusted) rate of about 6 percent, up from roughly 0.3 percent during the previous 5-year period. The lion's share of this growth-37percent between 1995 and 1998-occurred in Information Technology (IT) industries. In 1998, IT industries invested $44.8 billion in R & D, or nearly one-third of all company funded R & D."2

· Last year, the United States spent about $77 billion on pre-scription and non-prescription medications, and invested approximately 23 per-cent, or nearly $18 billion, of this amount on research, development, and testing aimed at discovering new drugs and evaluating their effectiveness.3

· In the same year, our nation spent about $313 billion on public K-12 education, but invested less than 0.1 percent of that amount to determine what educational techniques actually work, and to find ways to improve them.4

In its 1997 landmark report, the Panel on Educational Technology of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) recommended that "the federal government initiate a large-scale program of rigorous empirical research aimed at improving both the effectiveness and the cost-effectiveness of elementary and secondary education in the United States ... at a level equal to at least 0.5 percent of the nation's aggregate K-12 educational spending, or approximately $1.5 billion per year at present expenditure levels."5 We are a long way from this goal. Consider the following:

· The current budget for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, the major research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, is $540 million.6 Even adding the $60 million spent by the Research, Evaluation, and Communication Division of the National Science Foundation's Education and Human Resources Directorate,7 best estimates suggest total spending for education research is in the $600 million range.

· The federal government invests more than $75 billion a year in research in science and technology development in military, health, aerospace, agriculture, and other areas. Added to this are equivalent industry investments. It is obvious that R & D in these fields are mature. By comparison, the learning R & D field is in its infancy.8

Educational Research Should Lead to Enhanced Learning
Performance

We are at a critical moment of discovery in the quest to "unlock the mysteries of learning." As reported in recent National Academy of Sciences reports, learning sciences have made substantial progress in the past 30 years, more than most people realize.9 This expanding knowledge base about how we learn has important implications for improving education at all levels. And it is telling us something important: what goes on in schools is far from optimal for learning.10

We know from this research that learning environments should be centered around knowledge, learners, social interactions, and assessment. Instead, learning environments in school often:

· Focus on the short-term recall of facts, rather than opportunities for deeper building of knowledge
· Organize around the top-down, teacher-and-textbook centered instruction, rather than the needs of the individual learner

· Limit social interaction to occasional times with peers in the classroom encouraging solo study, rather than collaboration

· Allow current assessment to influence instruction in ways that may not match the goals of 21st Century learning

Schools often use technology to mimic this pattern of a top-down, lecture or text-driven model of instruction. Similarly, we have used the Internet in a narrow fashion, like vast textbooks or lectures online, instead of exploring its interactive potential.

Technology can support what we now know to be more effective learning environments. Interactive applications linked to the Internet can provide environments better matched to support learner-centered, knowledge-centered, community-centered, and assessment-centered conditions for learning.

New technological tools and applications allow for expanded forms of communication, analysis, and expression by students and teachers. These innovations support new forms of teaching and understanding built on the early findings of learning research.

Building the Foundation for
21st Century Learning Goals

Perhaps the greatest barrier to innovative teaching is assessment that measures yesterday's learning goals. It is a classic dilemma: tests do a good job of measuring basic skills, which, in turn, influence the teaching of these skills so students can score well on the tests. Testing works well so long as we are testing the right things.

Learning frameworks at the K-12 level are important for providing a common definition of what is valued, but often they are built around collections of content rather than demonstrations of higher-order cognitive, affective, and social skills vital in a knowledge-based economy. Most states use standardized tests for determining how well students meet these frameworks at several grade levels.

Witnesses before the Commission made it clear that academic standards are important, but they must be connected to the needs of the 21st Century. Often this is not the case. Too often today's tests measure yesterday's skills with yesterdays' testing technologies-paper and pencil.

What will it take to develop tests that truly reflect what students need to learn for the 21st
Century? It will take a concerted effort and large amounts of R & D funding with the collaboration of educators and psychometricians, content specialists, and technologists. Above all, it will take a focus on the potential of technology to help us better measure the knowledge, competencies, and understandings we value in education.
The same kinds of innovative 21st Century tools and learning environments that people are developing for teaching and learning can be designed to administer and score student performances.

Advances in testing technologies have made it possible to extend test item formats beyond the selected-response formats of past test designs. For example, through web-based testing a student may be asked to place works of art along a timeline, to design a building to meet a set of constraints, to troubleshoot a faulty system, or to analyze a text and compare it for historical accuracy with other documents of the same era.

In computer adaptive testing, the test "adapts" to the examinee's performance on it. The individual is given a question, and, if answered correctly, moves on to more difficult questions. Incorrect responses generate less difficult questions. Information is stored on the computer and the score reflects the skill level he or she has achieved. The use of computer-adaptive testing is growing in the military and training fields, and for professional certification (Medical Licensing Examination) and graduate admissions testing (e.g., Graduate Record Exam and Graduate Management Admissions Test).19

With storage and delivery capabilities of the Web, it is now possible to provide web-based test administration. A central server may contain an "item bank" of thousands of questions of varying types and difficulty levels. Students could take the tests from their classroom or computer lab, with the delivery of items adapted to the students' performance. Scoring could be immediate, and administrators and teachers could have access to this information at any level-aggregated by school, grade level, classroom, individual student, or even concept area. This feedback could provide much better monitoring of achievement at all levels, and, unlike today's large-scale assessments, make it possible for teachers to adapt instruction in response to commonly found difficulties, or an individual student's learning profile.20

The use of information technologies, for both teaching and assessment, afford new opportunities for an increased focus on the application of knowledge, not just its rote recitation. Assessment of student performance can be embedded, almost seamlessly, in systems that promote continuous learning.

However, the current forms of testing are not designed to measure how educational reforms, including those based on technology, can improve student understanding. This mismatch between reforms and testing leads many to underestimate the impact of technology. It discourages educators from spending the effort to undertake these reforms and changes in practice.

Fortunately, development of sophisticated test construction, delivery, and scoring through new technologies will make it possible to do a better job of evaluating the skills we seek to build.

Educational Research That
Teachers Value

Too often educational research has been seen as esoteric, faddish, or too far from the realm of the day-to-day to have meaning. It takes too long, and is too little used.

In part, this reflects the isolated researcher in the university community who may not be connected with K-12 schools, or even the teacher education programs in his or her own institution. The highest forms of knowledge-building today are those that come through collaboration and sharing of what is known, just as medical research pulls together relevant specialties (from genetics to infectious diseases, neuroscience, pharmacology, or radiology) in exploring a problem and potential ways of addressing it.

Similarly, research on learning will need to draw on specialists in neurocognition, behavioral and biological sciences, and other fields, as well as the expertise of content area specialists, educational practitioners, designers, and technology developers to create the applications that carry research findings into the classroom. And teachers can now be more a part of the process, as the Internet links them to the world of the researcher, making classrooms more likely settings for research and for implementation of research findings.

Witnesses before this Commission called for such "mission-oriented" research, combining basic and applied research, designed to yield fundamental new knowledge while exploring problems that have important practical consequences. And this research should focus on problems of practice faced daily by teachers and administrators-research for real-time practice, not just research on practice.

Imagine if schools, on demand, could apply research technologies to profile what a student needs to learn, how he or she learns best, what his or her learning style is, and what worked or did not work in the past, with continuous feedback to teachers, parents, and the student.

The Internet, with its tools for collaborative research and immediate communication, makes it possible to create new models of know- ledge-building communities that can support and quickly implement new forms of research, innovation, and application.

ENDNOTES

1. See, for example, "Selected Examples of Research on the Effectiveness of Educational Technology" in eLearning: Putting a World-Class Education at the Fingertips of All Students. United States. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology. Washington, DC. Prepublication draft. November 2000.
2. United States. Department of Commerce. Digital Economy 2000. Buckley, Patricia, Sandra Cooke, Donald Dalton, Jess Dumagan, Gurmukh Gill, David Henry, Susan LaPorte, Sabrina Montes, Dennis Pastore, and Lee Price. Washington, D.C. 2000. http://www.esa.doc.gov/de2000.pdf
3. Shaw, David, D. E. Shaw and Co, Inc. and Juno Online Services. Testimony to the Web-based Education Commission. September 14, 2000. http://www.webcommission.org/directory
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. United States. Department of Education. Fiscal Year 2000 Budget Summary - February 1999. Washington, D.C. 1999. http://www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/Budget00/BudgetSumm/apndx-2o.html
7. National Science Foundation. Summary of FY 2001 Budget Request to Congress. Data from the Education and Human Resources Directorate's 1999 fiscal year allocation for Research, Evaluation and Communication. 2000. http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/bud/fy2001/ehr.htm
8. Arizona Learning Technology Partnership. e-Testimony to the Web-based Education Commission. August 31, 2000. http://www.webcommission.org/directory
9. See, for example, National Research Council. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, 1999; How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, 1999; and How People Learn, Expanded Edition. 2000. National Academy Press. Washington, D.C. 1999-2000. http://www.nap
10. Bransford, John D., Vanderbilt University. Testimony to the Web-based Education Commission. September 14, 2000. http://www.webcommission.org/directory
11. For more information, see http://www.hi-ce.org/sciencelaboratory/modelit/index.html
12. For more information, see http://tango.mth.umassd.edu
13. For more information, see http://www.globe.gov
14. Another example is "Hands-On Universe", an educational program that enables students to investigate the universe while applying tools and concepts from science, math, and technology. http://hou.lbl.gov
15. For more information, see http://www.thinkquest.org
16. For more information, see http://homepage.newschool.edu/~johnsonc
17. For more information, see http://www.concord.org/projects/index.html
18. For more information, see http://www.iearn.org
19. Bennett, Randy. e-Testimony to the Web-based Education Commission. July 24, 2000. http://www.webcommission.org/directory
20. Ibid.