Understanding the nature of accountability failure in a technology‐filled, laissez‐faire classroom: disaffected students and teachers who give in

Abstract

This paper discusses how the curriculum is shaped by the situational logic of a technology‐filled classroom, and how this logic is under the influence of ideas about student–teacher interactions and ‘do‐it‐yourself learning’. It analyses case material from a school using game theory. Free access in the classroom to the Internet, games, and chatting makes it difficult for the teacher to control the students' operations. When a student deems a threat to be empty, it is not rational for that student to allow the threat to influence his or her own actions. The laissez‐faire regime is a result of rational considerations made by both parties. However, when students do not assume responsibility for learning, an accountability failure arises as a rational response to the design of the institutional framework.

Keywords:

• accountability
• computer uses in education
• curriculum in Norway
• discipline problems
• teacher–student relationship

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank M. Fiskaa, J. Hovi, K. Jordell, K. Midgaard, T. Ogden, A. Telhaug, and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and particularly B. U. Engelsen who has read different drafts. My thanks also go to everyone at Pioneer School (management, teachers, and students) for giving me access to themselves and the inner life of the school. Not least I must also thank T. H. Frolich and G. M. Vestby of The Network for IT‐Research and Competence in Education for generously making their empirical material available to me.

Notes

1. A search on ‘accountability’ in the ERIC database yielded 14 214 hits (4 August 2004).

2. The experiment was evaluated by The Research and Competence Network for ICT in Education (Erstad et al. 2000, Frolich and Vestby 2003).

3. This paper is based on empirical data collected in March and June 2001. The empirical material from this period consists of classroom observations and interviews with 20 teachers (interviewed partly as individuals and partly in groups) and 36 students involved in the experiment in the two school years 1999–2001. In this period, three classes (the second form in the upper‐secondary school) had been using portable PCs for 1.5 years. The average age of the students was 17 years when the interviews were conducted, and they were from branches of study within general subjects, health subjects, and arts and crafts. If teachers and students who were absent on those days on which the interviews were conducted are disregarded, all teachers and students who at this time had been following the reform over a period of 1.5 years were included in the interviews. The interview data were gathered in part by me and in part by T. H. Frolich and G. M. Vestby.

4. The group‐interviews appear as the social production of opinions through linguistic interaction (Kvale 1996: 226). There are examples of how events in the classroom were experienced differently by students in the interview data (Dean and Whyte 1969), and also of how in the course of the conversation they corrected one another's views of reality. I interpret the students' statements as truthful, candid, and compatible with observations in the classroom.

5. The game‐theoretical analysis builds to a considerable extent on the interview data, because game‐theoretical analysis is based on intentional explanations (Elster 1983: 83).

6. ‘Patience’ is a part of the electronic package provided by the school owner.

7. Transcripts of interviews are collected in notebooks numbered from A to I. F:8 means book F, page 8. The responses are translated.

8. I have cross‐checked, where possible, information given in particular interviews with other information I had access to (other interview statements, the school's internal documents, observations, etc.). The teachers were also interviewed in groups (and individually). My estimation is that the teachers who took part in the group interviews gave the impression of being very frank, and I regard the information that was given as being trustworthy—because untrue information would have been corrected by colleagues. In fact, it seemed that the group interviews contributed to the teachers' becoming aware of the extent of the frustrations, and that nearly all those who participated in the school pilot scheme were frustrated over the loss of control. There was only one teacher who unambiguously supported the principal's view of not having common rules. When she was about to leave the group interview, she was asked if she wished to make any concluding remarks. She said: ‘No thanks, I dare not’.

9. This applied in particular to cases in which several alternative interpretations were possible (Kvale 1996). An example is a teacher who declared that he had made up his mind not to intervene in the case of students' misuse of the computers. After an observed teaching period, this teacher wrote an e‐mail to a student (who had not worked with the tasks he was supposed to): ‘I was a little disappointed with your efforts yesterday. It must have been a complete waste of a lesson for you. I'll be generous this time.’ This indicates that this teacher, in spite of his declaration that he did not intervene in the students' activities, did in fact give a student a cautious reprimand.

10. My meetings with the students would often start with ‘Are you from the county?’ I assured them that I was not from the county, i.e. the school‐owner, but that I was a researcher. They would then continue, somewhat hesitantly, with what they were doing.

11. I observed different groups of students in school periods spread over single days but I have no detailed and systematic records of individual students' commitment over a longer period of time.

12. The researcher's theoretical perspective will influence the conclusions drawn on the basis of interviews and observations. As researchers we are caught in the web of science, and we see the world through our existing knowledge. It is interesting that my evaluations in this paper are different from the assessments in the evaluation report on the school experiment. There the passage quoted is commented on as follows: ‘Here there are academic work, other schoolwork, conversation, entertainment, games, music, surfing and chatting in perfect harmony. … The teacher's presence with accompanying power of definition does not exist. … Play and learning … can be even more closely linked together’ (Erstad et al. 2000: 188, 202; emphases added).

13. The school did not have monitoring programmes that show what the students are engaged in.

14. Several studies show that students regard human qualities, such as being pleasant, cheerful, and good‐tempered, define important quality dimensions of teachers (Jersild 1940, Denscombe 1986, Johannesen et al. 1997, 2002).

15. The ‘matching law’ is one possible explanation mechanism (Chung and Herrnstein 1967, Solnick et al. 1980, Ainslie and Haendel 1983).

16. An extensive empirical study of students and teachers in the upper‐secondary school in Norway provides evidence for claiming that most teachers give in to students (Dale and Waerness 2003). Another study shows that Norwegian students make considerably more noise in the classroom than students in other countries (an exception is Greece (Lie et al. 2001)), while Young in Norway 2002 (Rossow 2003) provides documentary evidence that two out of three students think the teachers ought to be stricter with students who create a disturbance.

17. The school has applied sanctions directed against the illegitimate use of pornographic material, but these sanctions were not severe. In one case pornographic material was put on the school's web‐site. This was sanctioned by a 3‐day suspension. Another case concerned the following: ‘There was an amusing episode a little while ago, a guy who wanted to print out a porn picture, but sent it to the printer in the staff room. There were reprisals and stuff. He cocked up a bit there, said Camilla laughing’ (I:20). This student was suspended for the rest of the school day. These kinds of sanctions are not sufficiently severe to make much of an impression on the students.

18. The teachers at the school react differently when they observe non‐academic activities in the lessons. The teachers give different views on the question of applying sanctions against non‐academic activity: one teacher say that he confiscates the network card as often as 8–10 times in the course of a school year, while the others ignore the problem. One teacher said: ‘I don't quite know whether I go along with prohibiting games and music. Because that would be awful’ (D:32).

19. ‘Responsibility for the students' own learning’ was a slogan used by the educational authorities in connection with a school reform in Norway 1994–2005.

20. The Norwegian curriculum guidelines prescribe the use of project work.

21. Incentives work well in some contexts, but appear counterproductive in others. Extrinsic motivation can conflict with intrinsic motivation (Deci 1975).

22. The dynamics of principal teacher interaction and teacher student interaction are analysed in Elstad (2005, in press).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eyvind Elstad

Eyvind Elstad is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Oslo, PO Box 1099, Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway; e‐mail: [email protected]. His research interests are in the intersection of curriculum and teacher‐student relationships and in the relevance of rhetoric to the study of power in educational communication.