Resources

Chris Davies, Geoff Hayward and Linariah Lukman, Department of Educational Studies, Oxford University

The full version of this review is available to download in pdf format - see box below. On this page you'll find the executive summary.

Executive summary

The 14-19 phase is a period of transition for young people as they move from compulsory to post-compulsory education and training, into the labour market and to higher education. The outcome is an increasingly heterogeneous population of learners distributed across a wide range of learning situations with different and often highly specific learning needs. Choices made during this phase – whether to carry on studying, what to study, where and how – all have the potential to affect the future life course. As a consequence, the 14-19 phase has been moving inexorably up the political agenda given current policy concerns with competitiveness, productivity, the need for a more skilled workforce and a more socially inclusive society.

An emerging set of policies

However, despite almost 30 years of reform the 14-19 phase is not underpinned by a coherent system of education and training. Young people and their families are faced by a welter of disparate learning opportunities from which to construct a learning career. Guidance to support the formation of such a career remains weak, with the result that too many young people choose poorly, ending up either in a learning blind alley or in low skilled and often temporary work that does not offer prospects for further learning that leads to qualifications. Increasingly, therefore, education and training policy for this phase has focused on reducing the academicvocational divide, producing a more coherent system that is simpler to navigate and providing more scope for young people to construct an individualised learning career that matches their needs and interests. Digital technologies are seen as having an important role to play in delivering all of these policy objectives.

Learning and development

The 14-19 period is also one of huge personal, social and psychological change. Young people continue to develop their higher cognitive skills and their ability to self-regulate their learning. Such development is best fostered by providing challenging learning tasks, with young people having meaningful choice over the tasks they choose to do and how they complete them. Achieving these twin aims of increased development of higher cognitive skills and improving self-regulation is central to wider concerns about promoting lifelong learning. To make sure more young people are successful in developing these attributes requires access to powerful learning environments which are often heavily reliant on digital technologies.

Another major concern is that young people in this age range are thought to lack motivation or to have low self-esteem. However, the use of such terms can obscure as well as illuminate. Thus it is never the case that young people are unmotivated but rather that they are more motivated to undertake some sorts of activities than others. A more in-depth understanding of the multifaceted nature of self-worth is therefore needed to underpin the construction of powerful learning environments than relying on more surface use of the constructs of motivation and self-esteem. In general, young people’s feelings of self-worth are likely to grow if they are engaged in tasks which they perceive as being important and in which they are successful. This promotes person-environment fit and leads to growth.

However, using digital technologies simply for their motivational affordances will not be enough to ensure young people have the opportunity to achieve. The research evidence suggests that motivational variables do not directly affect achievement outcomes. Rather the effects of such variables are mediated by variables linked to the development of self-regulation and higher cognitive skills. Thus developing digital solutions to meet the learning needs of young people in this phase has to take account of this complexity.

Developing powerful learning environments for the future will, therefore, need to take account of a range of research evidence about how young people develop during this phase, in addition to linking strongly to policy imperatives if they are going to be successful. The design of such learning environments can be guided by six questions derived from recent research on constructivist and social constructivist learning theory:

• Are the intended outcomes of the learning environment durable, flexible, functional, meaningful, generalisable, and application-oriented?
• Are thinking, learning, collaboration and regulation skills being taught?
• Is there a shift of focus towards more experiential learning: more active, cumulative, constructive, goal-directed, diagnostic and reflective learning?
• Is there a shift of focus towards more independent learning: more discoveryoriented, contextual, problem-oriented, case-based, socially and intrinsically motivated learning?
• Is there conscious attention for the gradual increase of independence according to the sequence of independent work, strategic learning and self-directed learning?
• Is there modelling, external monitoring, scaffolding, metacognitive guidance, attention for self-evaluation, practice of skills, feedback and reflection?

Digital technologies and the 14-19 age group

Digital technologies are deployed in a wide range of elaborate and inventive ways in order to manage and support young people’s current learning, and their processes of making key choices about future learning. These different kinds of provision encompass affordances such as helping young people to plot learning pathways that enable them to get the best out of a range of local educational provision; some allow their teachers and others to keep detailed records of progress and achievement as they move through that provision; and some allow for innovative ways of making that provision engaging and accessible. This includes, importantly, provision for those excluded from the mainstream educational system. A tension still exists, though, between the desire to use digital technologies to provide learning opportunities that support more independent and adult forms of learning, and the need that many teachers feel not to lose control over the curriculum and associated modes of learning.

Case studies

Four case studies are used to illuminate the ways in which digital technologies can be used to support learning during this phase. The case studies represent a gradual change in the extent to which the use of the digital technology is embedded in the learning environment. All the case studies testify, at least to some extent, to the need to think again about the nature of learning environments, the need for teachers and learners to mutually reconfigure their roles, and the costs of developing innovative solutions if digital technologies are to fulfill their potential in improving learning opportunities for all young people in this age range. At its boldest, such new thinking envisages the construction of very different sorts of learning environments, especially for those in vocational education and training, which aim to surmount theory-practice divides whilst encouraging the use of higher cognitive skills by increasingly selfregulated learners.

Conclusion

Overall, however, the research base on which to base practice for the use of digital technologies to enhance the learning of 14-19 year-olds is weak. Much of the ‘literature’ consists of nascent solutions based upon interesting ideas or a form of promotional discourse that portrays learners in very false ways. However, we cannot wait for research to answer all the questions we might have about the efficacy of digital technologies in promoting learning before we proceed to implementation. A way forward would be to use a design experiment approach involving collaborations of teachers, software manufacturers and instructional design experts. This would require teachers to adopt an experimental stance to their teaching. The extent to which this can happen widely enough to make a real difference to our understanding of how these technologies can help to improve the quality of the learning experience for young people in this phase, is seriously weakened by the Government’s continuing insistence, at least in England, to rely on narrow accountability measures based on exam success.

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