Supporting teachers’ task design processes. Exploring an exemplary case of the use of the activity checklist

ABSTRACT

The use of digital technologies continues to increase in classrooms. For teachers, this involves an increased focus on the task design process for supporting student outcomes when using these technologies. Using the Activity Theory based Evaluation Version of the Activity Checklist as a theoretical framework, this paper explores an exemplary case of the use of the Activity Checklist through the analysis of a classroom task from the perspective of the teacher task design process. The results showed that the Activity Checklist as a framework was fruitful to capture and study the teacher design process as activities, illustrating important aspects in designing tasks for student work. It is concluded that the use of the Activity Checklist may support teachers’ task design processes for motivating and supporting student outcomes related to the use of digital technologies. Further, the use of Activity Checklist can help to identify potential issues in the task design process from the teacher perspective, improve practitioners’ work and in turn provide guiding principles for educational development.

Intergovernmental economic policy continues to increase expectations that digital technologies be used in K12 school contexts to innovate ways of supporting students’ higher order thinking, conceptual understanding, creativity, imagination, and problem-solving skills, so as to prepare students for their future work (Organisation for Economic Co–operation and Development, 2016). But how teachers’ use of digital technologies in K12 classrooms impacts student outcomes remains unclear. For example, some studies of 1:1 initiatives – where teachers and students were each provided with their own laptop computers – have shown that using digital technologies may positively impact learning conditions for writing, digital competence, and student motivation (Keane & Keane, 2017; Penuel, 2006; Richardson et al., 2013; Zheng et al., 2016). Other studies of such 1:1 interventions, however, report no generalizable impact (Cuban, 2001, 2013). Beneficial conditions for technology-enhanced learning appear to relate, among other things, to teachers’ levels of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2018).

While policy calls for teachers to support learning with the innovative use of digital technologies, research calls for a rethinking of teaching (Laurillard, 2012). In order to enhance student outcomes via technology, teachers must consider design in their teaching (Hauge, 2014; Jahnke & Kumar, 2014; Laurillard, 2012; Laurillard et al., 2018; Olofsson & Lindberg, 2014). Freeman et al. (2017) report on the significant difficulties of rethinking teachers’ roles with regard to the use of digital technologies (Freeman et al., 2017).

Swedish schools benefit from the access to digital technologies provided by many governmental and municipal efforts over the years (Håkansson, 2015a; Jedeskog, 2007; Tallvid, 2015). Digitalization in schools continues to increase (Eurydice, 2018; The Swedish Government, 2014, 2017). Despite access to digital technologies in schools, use of the technologies remains low (National Agency for Education, 2016; The Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2012). Teachers’ in-practice use of digital technologies requires continued professional development (Håkansson, 2015a; Grönlund, 2014; Tallvid, 2015). Given the already high level of access to digital technologies, a stronger focus on teachers’ reflective use of digital technologies and how that links to student outcomes may be what is missing from the design of classroom tasks.

So as to offer practical support to teachers designing tasks for students (the task design process), this paper will use the evaluation version of the activity checklist (AC; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006/2009, pp. 272–273) as a theoretical framework for exploring and analyzing a classroom task, which it will do by describing an exemplary case of the use of the AC. The AC and the task (which is about globalization) are detailed below. This practice-based paper focuses on how the task dimensions of teaching can be redesigned in light of digitalization. To do this, I explore how the AC as a framework can be operationalized, I discuss the use of the AC for improving practitioners’ work, and I provide guiding principles for educational development. The research questions are:

• How can the AC be used as a framework for operationalizing the teacher’s task design process?

• How can the globalization task itself be described, analyzed, and understood using the AC as a framework?

• Given this analysis, what are some guiding educational principles for teachers’ task design that can be proposed?

This paper adds to previous research from the Unos Umeå research project, which followed a 1:1 laptop initiative to explore how the use of digital technologies affected teaching and learning activities and how these activities developed and transformed over time. The research project focused on multiple organizational levels, including the levels of the student (Håkansson, 2013), teacher (Håkansson, 2015b, 2015c, 2019a), school leader (Håkansson, 2015d, 2019b), and schools as organizations. In these studies, teachers reported needing time and professional development to rethink teaching designs and task design processes (Håkansson, 2015a, 2019a). They noted a shift over time in the use of digital technologies in teaching activities, from using laptops for all tasks to more considered or reflective use of them in teaching practices (Håkansson 2015a, 2019a). During the classroom observations, teachers reflected upon the challenges they faced when designing and administering student tasks. It was at this juncture that the AC emerged as a potential theoretical framework for supporting teachers’ task design processes. Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006/2009) originally developed the AC as a theoretical framework for guiding researchers or designers through critical contextual factors in the implementation of a task. Here, the AC is used to explore how teachers in practice – as designers – may notice critical factors or potential issues during the task design process. This paper explores an exemplary case of using the AC by describing the operationalization of the AC, examining potential task design issues from the teacher’s perspective, discussing use of the AC for improving practitioners’ work, and providing guiding principles for educational development.

Teachers’ use of digital technologies

Teachers’ use of digital technologies appears related to their own ICT skills (Sipilä, 2014). In a study of teachers who used digital technologies successfully, Ertmer et al. (2012) found a close alignment in the teachers between student-centered beliefs and student-centered practices (such as authenticity, student choice, and collaboration). Furthermore, Yeung et al. (2012) report that teachers must develop digital competence in order to use digital technologies effectively in the classroom. They suggest advancing teachers’ digital technology competence in order to help them gain confidence in applying these technologies in their teaching activities. This involves pushing beyond using the laptop as an administrative tool (Halverson & Smith, 2009). According to Ertmer and Ottenbreit-Leftwich (2013), the pedagogical shift needed to implement the use of digital technologies in the classroom takes time. Drayton et al. (2010) specifically see teachers’ need for professional development and time to discuss content, student work, pedagogy, and technology. Furthermore, to have an impact, professional development must be collaborative and situated in teachers’ everyday practice. Towndrow and Wan (2012) emphasize the importance of teachers’ collaboration in finding and sharing work methods. Teachers must also trust their own abilities and work in a school culture that supports technical, pedagogical, and subject-related didactic competencies (Kopcha, 2012; Mishra & Koehler, 2006). Therefore, research must address the many challenges that affect teachers’ use of digital technologies in the classroom (Warschauer et al., 2014). Significant differences appear in teachers’ processes of integrating digital technologies into K12 classrooms (Bocconi et al., 2013; Tondeur et al., 2010).

The activity checklist as a framework

Theoretical frameworks such as the AC have previously been used in human–computer interaction design to evaluate a design before real users gain access to or become involved in a system. In this paper, I recontextualize the AC as educational and task-oriented for use with teachers’ task design processes. Given the diversity and richness of empirical data related to using information technology in real-life contexts, such data needs to be analytically deconstructed while keeping the structure and constituency of the whole in mind (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006/2009, p. 97). Activity theory can serve here as a “powerful and clarifying descriptive tool” (Nardi, 1996, p. 4). When introducing a new form of mediation in an activity – such as enhancing learning through technology implementation and design – asking the right questions may be important because the mediation “does not simply expand the capacity of the existing activity but often also causes a qualitatively new stage to emerge” (Wertsch, 1981, p. 256). Thus, introducing digital technologies into teaching could cause new task dimensions of teaching to emerge in the classroom.

The activity checklist – the evaluation version

Based on activity theory’s basic principles, the AC (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006/2009, pp. 272–273) makes activity theory “more practically applicable in specific tasks of design and evaluation” (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006/2009, p. 97). Two versions of the AC exist: the design version and the evaluation version. In this paper, I use the evaluation version as a framework.

The AC includes four sections: (1) means and ends; (2) environment; (3) learning, cognition, and articulation; and (4) development. The means and ends concern how much the technology supports or constrains users in reaching their goal and how the technology itself helps bring about or resolve conflicts between different goals. Environment refers to how social and physical aspects of the technology integrate with tools, resources, and social rules. The learning, cognition, and articulation section focuses on external and internal activities and how the target technology supports transformation, while the development section concerns the developmental transformation of these components as a whole. Together, these sections cover how technology supports the activity in process (Kaptelinin et al., 1999).

The AC was first presented in 1999 (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006/2009) and was developed to guide researchers or designers through critical contextual factors in a use situation (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006/2009). As noted, such theoretical frameworks have typically been used to evaluate human–computer interaction designs before real users gain access to or become involved in a system. Korsgaard et al. (2016) describe several methods – such as cognitive walkthroughs, activity walkthroughs, and the AC – for explaining and highlighting the most important contextual factors of a user interface, including user goals and various social and physical aspects of the environment.

Over the years, the AC has been used to analyze, evaluate, and design many technologies for application in practice. Kaptelinen and Nardi (2006/2009) report its use with data detectors (Nardi et al., 1998), a newspaper information system (Macaulay, 1999; Macaulay et al., 2000), a tourist information kiosk’s website (Uden & Willis, 2001), and a building system involving a tangible user interface for collaborative work between designers and planners (Fjeld et al., 2004). Other researchers have used the AC to design semi-structured interviews (Turner & Turner, 2001) and observations (Cluts, 2003). Irestig et al. (2004) used it for discussing case study prototypes, and Vrazalic (2003) used it for work on the distributed usability evaluation method. A more important adaptation and widely adopted use of the AC is for a guided interview process (Duignan et al., 2006). These researchers identified limitations of the checklist, involving, among other things, the use of theoretical language in activities, the order of items, an excessive number of items, and a dichotomy between the evaluation and design checklists. Thus, despite providing a strong foundation, the AC “has some unfortunate shortcomings for use as a design tool” (Duignan et al., 2006, p. 21).

The AC can be considered an operationalization of AT. As an analytical framework for guiding task design processes and analyses, the AC may prove challenging to apply in practice (Vasiliou et al., 2017). However, the AC can also serve as a tangible tool or framework in practice and as a “valuable aide memoir and a tool for reflexivity” (Macaulay, 1999, p. 31). Activity theory continues to impact and inspire work in human–computer interaction (Clemmensen et al., 2016; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2018) and in education (Roth, 2004). Researchers have conducted more recent studies involving activity theory in the classroom (Nussbaumer, 2012) and in specific classroom tasks (Williams Chizhik & Williams Chizhik, 2018). However, using the AC appears relatively unexplored and may provide “a guide to the specific areas to which a researcher or practitioner should be paying attention when trying to understand the context in which a tool will be or is used” (Kaptelinin et al., 1999, p. 28). Thus, if used by the teacher in the process of designing a task’s learning activities, the use of the AC could help a teacher clarify important aspects of use, discover potential issues in the task design process, and identify areas for further improvement and development.

As mentioned before, the AC’s evaluation version contains the following sections: (1) means and ends; (2) environment; (3) learning, cognition, and articulation; and (4) development. First, I describe the globalization task, after which I present the evaluation version of the AC. Thereafter, I combine the two, using the AC to analyze the globalization task according to the different AC sections.

The globalization task

The globalization task was designed to be completed with a laptop and was presented to students in a 1:1 classroom during a classroom observation. The teacher presented the task to the students and showed a short film about globalization. The students then received the task and began their in-class work on it. As part of the task design, the teacher had made students responsible for planning the task, searching for information, and preparing the task, while the teacher was available for questions and support. The following tasks were given to each student to work on:

• What is globalization?

• Describe how globalization affects us in Sweden and in other parts of the world.

• What arguments exist for and against globalization?

• What do you think about globalization? Be careful to provide an argument for why you think this way.

• Be careful in writing which sources you have used.

• For help, refer to pages 71 to 74 in your book.

• A lot of information also exists on the Internet. Remember to evaluate the information and think about who has written it and for what purpose.

• Basic level: Describe globalization and the arguments for and against globalization.

• For a higher grade: Gain deeper insight into the problems regarding globalization.

• Your task should be no more than one page on the laptop or two pages by hand.

In the teacher’s task design process, the globalization task as a learning activity could be described as a set of goals and subgoals designed by the teacher to help the student (subject) attain the object (outcome) of learning, or passing the globalization task using laptops, books, pens, paper, teachers, and other students (tools). The teacher’s task design process involves consideration of the curriculum, course plan, grading matrix, classroom rules, and laptop rules (rules) along with the classroom community, teacher, and students (community). It also involves consideration of the distribution of work (division of labor) between the teacher and the student, the teacher’s responsibility to provide help and support, and the student’s responsibility for performing learning activities (actions and operations) within the task and producing the outcome. As previously noted, the evaluation version of the AC is divided into the following sections: (1) means and ends; (2) environment; (3) learning, cognition, and articulation; and (4) development. The globalization task activity and the teacher’s task design process will now be discussed according to the guidelines within each section.

Means and ends

When designing for student outcomes in the classroom, the teacher uses the laptop as technology to design tasks for students who also use laptops to reach the course outcomes. These course outcomes function as target actions or target goals. As part of the task design process, the teacher designs student-learning activities, goals, and subgoals using smaller subtasks as objects of activities. These subtasks can include, for example, searching the Internet for information about globalization, reading, writing, or understanding a text. Therefore, the goals are divided into subgoals to target various parts of the tasks; the deconstruction of target goals is part of the teacher’s task design process. An important part of the teacher’s task design process is establishing the criteria that allow assessment of students’ success or failure in achieving the target goals and subgoals. In this way, the teacher’s task design process supports students’ processes of working toward achieving each goal and subgoal in the task. In the globalization task, the work that students must do to achieve the task outcomes includes searching for information, reading the information found, and producing a text. The teacher’s structuring of goals and subgoals in the task design therefore supports students’ work on the topic of globalization, creating conditions for the student to illustrate knowledge learned so that the teacher can assess and grade the student’s work.

In the teacher’s design process, potential conflicts between target goals and the goals associated with other technologies and activities must be considered. In practice and in an educational context, such conflicts could occur for students who do not have a laptop or for students who use the library instead of a laptop to find information. Therefore, conflicts between certain goals must be resolved. When students choose not to use a laptop, the teacher’s task design process must be adapted to give students more time to search for information at the library or for the teacher to provide books or other resources for the work to continue. In such cases, teachers incorporate their role as an instrument of support in an alternative task design process, helping students achieve the outcome in a way that does not involve a laptop.

Simultaneously, the teacher’s task design process considers various levels of integration of the target goals – it designs target goals and subgoals to create conditions for higher-level learning activities. For example, the teacher must acknowledge various forms of laptop use among students. While some students may only work with the materials that they access via the laptop by combining and rephrasing them, other students may use the same information as stepping stones for further learning activities, such as creative processes (e.g., critical thinking, problem solving, or other reflective processes). Thus, the teacher’s task design process must focus on creating beneficial conditions for these higher-level skills.

Teachers must consider possible constraints in their task design process for supporting higher-level skills, such as the difference between the student’s choice to use technology in the task and the actual use that they make of the target technology. For example, in order to support the student, both the information found via a laptop and the student’s ability to evaluate this information must be incorporated into the teacher’s task design. Other constraints to consider are student motivation and student engagement. For the student, polymotivation (Kaptelinin & Uden, 2012), or multiple sources of motivation for the student, could create conflict or tension. For example, the student might lack motivation completely even though they feel pressure to complete the task to get a grade. Thus, the teacher’s task design process must support conditions that make the task more interesting than other activities afforded by the laptop.

The teacher’s task design process may include devising alternative ways of attaining target goals, as mentioned above. In classroom work, for instance, the teacher might use troubleshooting strategies and techniques to assist students. Such strategies could support learning activities (target goals and subgoals) by transforming learning activities from actions into operations and vice versa (Engeström, 1987; Leontiev, 1978). For example, within the task design, the teacher might intervene in a student’s search for information by suggesting a more suitable webpage or website, thus aligning the student’s learning activities once again with the targeted goals.

Environment

In the teacher’s task design process for the globalization task, the role that existing technology plays in achieving target goals and subgoals depends on how the laptop – the target technology – is used. In actual implementation of the task, however, other available tools may override use of the laptop. Traditional school tools such as books, pencils, and paper may be more readily available. Thus, the target technology in the teacher’s task design process – the laptops – may become replaced by other tools. For example, students may believe that mobile phones, besides being writing tools, could also be efficient tools for finding information. Here, students achieve the target goal or subgoal (searching for information on the Internet) of the teacher’s task design, but they do it with a tool other than the target tool. Teachers in a 1:1 environment would expect all students to have their own laptops. However, teachers may find that students do not have their laptops available when they are needed to complete learning activities and achieve target goals. For example, the laptop may be at home, in repair, or uncharged. This may result in students sharing tools and materials. According to the teacher’s task design, the outcome of the target goals and subgoals is expected to be an individually assessed and graded task. Thus, a conflict may occur between sharing knowledge (which many students regard as cheating) for the purpose of learning and for the purpose of producing knowledge in a text to be graded individually. Here, the teacher’s task design process could involve creating a collaborative learning environment to increase collaboration among students in pursuit of certain target goals and subgoals and support collaborative learning activities.

The environmental aspect also concerns the classroom layout and temporal organization of the classroom work environment. Some problems here may include students sitting too close together, disturbing one another, or failing to work on the task in a manner according to the teacher’s task design. A more practical disruption to the teaching and learning environment could be something as simple and practical as lacking sufficient electrical outlets in the classroom. The teacher’s task design process also incorporates pedagogical decisions regarding time restrictions. In the globalization task, the time allotted by the teacher for the task is important. With too much time, students may anticipate how long the task (learning outcome) would actually take in relation to the time allowed and decide to spend some time on alternative activities (this time would not be accounted for in the task). On the other hand, if the teacher’s design allows too little work time (e.g., students can work for only about 40 or 45 minutes on a task that entails a certain amount of research), the scheduled lesson may be too short for students to become sufficiently engaged in the work to reach the target goals and subgoals.

Division of labor refers to the division of labor between the student and teacher or, in this case, the division of responsibility. In the teacher’s design process, the learning outcome of the task is designed according to the curriculum and course plans and aligns with other applicable school regulations. Although the globalization task refers to criteria as basic or higher-level, these levels are unclear in the task and are not aligned with target goals and subgoals. Through the task design process, the teacher assumes responsibility for designing the task, whereas the student is responsible for completing the task as designed using the available tools: laptops, books, pencils, and paper. Therefore, the use of technology – for example, laptops and the Internet, which provide immediate access to infinite information – must be considered in the task design process, because these tools affect the division of responsibility. Other rules, norms, and procedures embedded in the learning activity include school, classroom, and laptop rules, which can be general or specific depending on classroom context (Ping Lim & Hang, 2003). As for social interactions and coordination related to the use of the target technology, the teacher’s task design supports individual tasks during which students must explore, solve, and write using the target technology in a manner consistent with the task design.

Learning, cognition, and articulation

In the teacher’s task design, learning activities include target goal and subgoal components for students’ internalization, such as information about globalization, arguments for and against globalization, and the student’s personal reflections on globalization. The student uses the laptop as the target technology to access new subject content, and although the student may gain no new knowledge about the target technology, the laptop may become more deeply a part of the learning environment as a result of the teacher’s task design. If the task design provides students with the time and opportunity to master new learning activities, knowledge can be distributed and accessed more efficiently as students learn to search for, analyze, and evaluate information critically. This reflective process can be designed into the task by the teacher as a form of reflection through externalization, as well as reflection through self-monitoring, which is necessary if the student is to follow the task design and complete the task.

In this case, the use of target technology to simulate target goals before implementation does not apply to the teacher’s task design, as students in this 1:1 classroom have laptops and are used to working with them. Nonetheless, in the teacher’s task design, providing students with support is important and necessary on at least two levels. First, the teacher must help the students use the laptops to find, review, and combine information to write their texts. Whether the task design and classroom environment systemically support this procedure is difficult to ascertain. Second, teachers must provide support for students who encounter technical issues with their laptops. In the classroom, the teacher may provide this support, but students also assist one another, and the school also provides organized IT support.

As noted above, the globalization task designed by the teacher appears to be based on individual work, so the processes required to coordinate individual and group learning activities through externalization are not clearly stated. But despite the lack of this element in the teacher’s task design, externalization most likely takes place as students collaborate and share information during the work process. Therefore, although students likely share information and content during the task’s learning activities, the teacher’s task design does not include the use of shared representations of learning to support collaborative work. Students might share their individual contributions as resources for the group (or organization) if the contributions are combined on a wiki or a blog. However, if the teacher only corrects the individual tasks and returns them to the student, the criterion of demonstrating learning is not fulfilled, and the teacher’s task design regarding collaborative activities is unclear.

Development

Does the teacher’s task design contain the use of target technology at various stages throughout the target actions’ life cycles? In this task, laptop use, although optional, is present throughout the task’s learning activities as prescribed by the teacher. The task’s design does not involve varied laptop use; rather, laptop use is implemented such that it increases over time. Moreover, depending on the teacher’s design process, how the implementation of laptop use should affect the structuring of target goals and subgoals may be difficult to identify. If students use laptops to complete the task as designed, they likely first search for information, then read and write, perhaps in a recursive process. This process is most likely highly individual with varying effects. However, if the teacher designs and structures target goals and subgoals with laptop use in mind, and the student follows the structure and uses the laptop for the learning activities at hand, then laptop use may have more effect. It is also difficult to determine whether the teacher’s task design might support new, higher-level learning activities or make them attainable through laptop use.

Students’ attitudes toward the target technology (laptops) may involve resistance, and are also difficult to evaluate. Depending on the teacher’s task design, students may perceive that laptop use is not mandatory. The teacher has provided both analog and digital versions of the task. This appears to signal the teacher’s anticipation of resistance, either from the teacher, who is not required to use a laptop, or from students whose laptops may not be available. When incorporating this element into the task design process, the teacher offers two options to ensure that all students can perform the task. Therefore, the target goals and subgoals present potential conflicts with attaining the learning activity’s higher-level goals, which depend upon laptop use. In this case, changes anticipated in the classroom environment include active laptop use and a systemic learning activity task design process intended to achieve the target actions and higher-level goals through laptop use. Furthermore, a conflict arises between intergovernmental policy’s intended laptop use goals and their actual use in the classroom.

Discussion

To explore how to support teachers’ task design processes, this paper uses the evaluation version of the AC (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006/2009, pp. 272–273) as a theoretical framework for in-depth analysis of a classroom task as an exemplary application of the AC. To answer the first research question (“How can the AC be used as a framework for operationalizing the teacher task design process?”), the globalization task was described using sections of the AC: means/ends, environment, learning/cognition/articulation, and development. When expressed in these terms, the description of the teacher’s task design process demonstrates the need for systemic teacher task design. Such systemic design supports students’ learning activities because it establishes goals and subgoals that support students’ work processes and identifies potential task issues during the task design process. Through the operationalization of specific goals and subgoals, the teacher’s task design process supports learning activities that may help students use the target technology. This process may decrease the use of laptops for non-schoolwork purposes and, through the task at hand, promote laptop use with schoolwork. If the teacher’s task design process is successful, use of the target technology may increase and create conditions for high-level skills that involve problem-solving and critical thinking.

The second research question explored how to describe, analyze, and understand the globalization task itself using the AC as a framework. The teacher’s task design process must account for students’ conflicts and tensions when working with the globalization task. The AC can be fruitfully used to explore and identify these. The AC also highlights the activities’ many operations and actions and the importance of teachers’ designs (Jahnke & Kumar, 2014; Kaptelinin et al., 1999; Laurillard, 2012; Laurillard et al., 2018; Olofsson & Lindberg, 2014). In the analysis, difficulties were encountered in attempting to separate the studied activity from many other intertwined and embedded activities. However, this exemplary case of the use of the AC demonstrates the need for clarity and structure in the designing of task goals and subgoals. These goals and subgoals are most important for students’ specific use of the target technology, acknowledging important factors like polymotivation, conflicting interests, and support for completing the task as designed.

Given the use of the AC as a framework for analysis, the third research question examined possible guiding educational principles for teachers’ task design. In the 1:1 classroom, the simple solution is to implement the laptop as a tool that replaces books, pen, and paper. Technology is necessary to go beyond routine activities, to extend learning toward more creative, innovative activities and higher-level thinking (Freeman et al., 2017). This is much more demanding and complex for teachers’ task design processes, as has been underscored by the many points identified, articulated, and analyzed using the AC as a framework. For example, in the globalization task, the possibility of attaining these higher-level skills is lost completely if the student decides not to use the laptop (Håkansson, 2013, 2015a, 2015b). For the teacher, both professional development and time are necessary to integrate technology into pedagogy (Ertmer & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2010; Kopcha, 2012; Mishra & Koehler, 2006).

The need for design that supports classroom technology use is important (Laurillard, 2012; Laurillard et al., 2018). Teaching teachers to design tasks that motivate students and support their learning through technology is crucial if the technology is to be used beyond routine information searches and classroom writing tasks (Freeman et al., 2017). A framework such as the AC, which captures and studies students’ activities as designed by the teacher, may not only illustrate important aspects of the activities at hand, but may also provide practical support for the teacher’s task design process by serving as a reflective tool (Macaulay, 1999). In teacher task design processes that use digital technologies in the classroom to support students’ activity and learning, the AC may provide a practical, productive framework for clarifying important aspects of use and areas for further development. Potential issues for task design processes were examined in this paper through an exemplary case of using the AC. Use of the AC may fruitfully support teachers’ efforts to combine pedagogy and technology and facilitate reflective, considered technology use in the classroom, thereby supporting practitioners’ use.

Given the previous limitations of the AC identified by Duignan, Noble, & Biddle (2006), it is important to note certain limitations of the language used in the AC. If teachers are to use the AC as a theoretical framework, practitioners may need to adapt the AC to make it suitable for operationalization and practical classroom use. This work may clarify the activities, goals, subgoals, and outcomes involved in teachers’ task design processes. Furthermore, these issues could be studied and expanded in collaboration with teachers in practice. These studies would involve collection of empirical data and focused analysis from the field, so as to further test the usage of the AC. Important directions for future research include investigating ways in which the AC could be further developed for designing for constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003), as well as for integrating frameworks aimed at high-quality, technology-enhanced 21st-century learning (Chee & Chai, 2018).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.