Contemporary Educational Thoughts Challenges Facing American Schools

Issues in Education
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Issues in Education
Initial Post: Article Evaluation
Section 1
Lei’s (2009) empirical study is by many measures a success. The first strength of the study emanates from the choice of study sample: because the researcher sought to determine the beliefs, attitudes, as well as technology experiences and expertise Digital Natives harbored as preservice teachers, it was appropriate to target first-year students in teacher education programs. This sample is appropriate for gaining insights regarding strengths and weaknesses in technology skills and knowledge that apply to all pre-service teachers, which is necessary for designing a suitable training program. Beyond the sample, the author invested great effort in designing survey questions: First, to perfect the survey questions, the survey was piloted with a few students and improved for clarity and simplicity. Secondly, the researcher invited experts where necessary; for instance, four technology specialists helped in ranking the difficulty levels of the technologies used in the survey. Since all variables of the research were relevant and explicitly communicated, followed by a consistent analysis, the study evidence is of high quality.
The immense success notwithstanding, certain changes could strengthen the credibility of data and the ensuing inferences. Ostensibly, expanding the sample size could help in improving the validity of results. One way to approach this is to include first-year students and sophomores since it might be argued that the measures of confidence simply reflected the lack of training and experience, considering that the respondents were not just pre-service teachers but purely freshmen.
Section 2
This article validates the idea that Digital Natives, who are pre-service teachers, are unprepared to use technology as an educational resource. From the survey findings, the cohort under study was experienced in using social media, but 32.7%, 40%, 36.4, and 29.1% of them lacked experience and expertise necessary for blogging, wikis, publishing audio files, and publication of videos respectively – the “technologies with potential for classroom application” (Lei, 2009, p. 91). As evidenced in Kumar and Vigil’s (2011) research, the general thrust of literature is that preservice teachers are not as robustly experienced in using Web 2.0 tools the same way they are in using social networking tools like Facebook. Also, Piotrowski (2014) concluded that knowing how to utilize technology in effective teaching is not an innate quality, nor is the skill easily picked from today’s digital culture.
In light of the evidence for superficial knowledge in and reserved attitude to employ digital technology in the classroom context, it is justified for Lei to recommend systematic technology preparation to help preservice teachers acquire the skills, establish a link between the digital tools and their profession, and enable them to transform from digital-native students to digital-native educators.
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