The Challenge

The field of educational technology is under external pressure to provide evidence of

identifiable learning outcomes that can be attributed to technology. Leaders within the
educational technology research community agree about the importance of such evidence.
Each year the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) jointly sponsors
a National Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) to consider such issues in concert with
partner associations. Ten national education associations are currently partners in the National
Technology Leadership Coalition (www.NTLCoalition.org).
One goal of the coalition is to proactively facilitate needed research that will advance the
profession. We would like to share the collective perspective of the editors of five educational
technology journals who are members of the National Technology Leadership Coalition. In
order to reach as diverse an audience as possible, an abbreviated version of this report is also
being published in Learning and Leading with Technology.
Framing the Issues
Evidence that technology supports improved student learning can be gained only through
credible research, but the way in which research issues are framed plays an important role in
the results obtained. In the past media comparison was a common design used by researchers
interested in educational technology. These kinds of studies compared the effectiveness of one
medium with another on a variety of dependent variables. Such studies were popular for many
reasons; they are conceptually simple and they are appealing on an intuitive level. The search
for relative advantage is at the heart of many scientific studies, and, “Which is better?” is a
natural question for policy makers (and beginning researchers) to pose.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Richard Clarke conducted a well-known meta-analysis of this
type of educational technology research and concluded that media are “mere vehicles that
deliver instruction but do not influence achievement any more than the truck that delivers our
groceries causes changes in our nutrition” (1983, p. 445). This perspective might be termed the
transmission model of educational technology – the view that technology is a delivery
mechanism with no unique capacity or capabilities that might intrinsically affect learning.
This view stands in stark contrast to the view guiding much of the research to that point, which
might be thought of as the “exposure model” of educational technology. After all, what Clarke
(rightly) concluded was that mere exposure to technology confers no particular educational
benefits.
Of course, the same is true of pencils, paper