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Reconsidering home learning in the digital learning environment: The perspectives of parents, students, and teachers

Rebecca Jesson, Maria Meredith, and Naomi Rosedale
Abstract: 

This article considers home learning for students whose schools have moved to digital learning environments. In this study we sought to gather perspectives about what sorts of home-learning activities might support school learning given that students have individual digital devices and access to the internet and class websites. Interviews with parents, students, and teachers at decile 1 schools focused on the learning activities that students might engage in at home as well as the role of parents to support their children’s learning. Findings indicated differing perspectives on the relative merit of formal and informal learning activities and whether these should be set by the teacher or taken up by students independently. The role of parents to support learning was agreed on by all participants, however, less clear was what form that support should take. The potential for unintended constraints to learning through mismatches in understandings is discussed.

Journal issue: 

Reconsidering home learning in the digital learning environment

The perspectives of parents, students, and teachers

REBECCA JESSON, MARIA MEREDITH, AND NAOMI ROSEDALE

Key points

In digital learning environments teachers can enable parent involvement by providing clear expectations for home learning.

In digital learning environments teachers can enable parent involvement through explicit messages about learning conversations.

Teachers can work to counter the “second digital divide” by providing and supporting higher order home-learning activities for all children.

Students need resources and activities to employ 21st century skills at home.

This article considers home learning for students whose schools have moved to digital learning environments. In this study we sought to gather perspectives about what sorts of home-learning activities might support school learning given that students have individual digital devices and access to the internet and class websites. Interviews with parents, students, and teachers at decile 1 schools focused on the learning activities that students might engage in at home as well as the role of parents to support their children’s learning. Findings indicated differing perspectives on the relative merit of formal and informal learning activities and whether these should be set by the teacher or taken up by students independently. The role of parents to support learning was agreed on by all participants, however, less clear was what form that support should take. The potential for unintended constraints to learning through mismatches in understandings is discussed.

In this article we explore perspectives on what home learning should look like in a digital learning environment. Our study was situated within six decile 1 schools with high proportions of Māori and Pasifika students (five primary and one secondary school) in which each learner from Year 5 to Year 13 has a personal digital device. The students used the devices regularly as a tool for learning, for example to access, evaluate, and apply information, to create artefacts about their new knowledge, and to share their learning, via blogs, with their families, peers, and the wider public. Teachers in these schools use Google Sites for students to access resources and learning tasks. Students share their artefacts or activities with the teacher for feedback. Using individual blogs, students’ learning is also shared with their families, allowing families to see what students have been learning at school. Such digital learning environments are becoming an increasingly common addition in New Zealand schools.

Home learning in the digital learning environment

In contexts where the digital device is owned by the family, students can take their device home to use out of school time. There are a number of possibilities for out-of-school learning when students have individual devices and internet access. One common slogan, used by technology companies as well as educationalists, suggests that learning can now happen anywhere, anytime. There are various ways this might occur, for example through engagement in learning activities in community spaces such as churches, museums, or libraries (e.g., Weiss & Lopes, 2015), through “seamless” access to curriculum content in self-chosen times (e.g. Davies & Jewitt, 2011; Di Iorio, Feliziani, Mirri, Salomoni, & Vitali, 2006), through an increasing role for informal learning (Trinidad & Broadley, 2008) or, like traditional homework, through home-learning activities set by teachers for students to complete out of school, for example, practice assignments, home reading, or project-based activities (Kerawalla et al, 2007).

The value of set home-learning activities is much debated. Some argue that they take time away from other important family activities and exacerbate economic disparities (Kohn, 2006). However, it seems that home learning can be valuable for students if it is done in ways that promote their self-regulation skills, control over their learning, and positive parental involvement (Van Voorhis, 2011). In particular, it is this potential for positive parental involvement in students’ school learning that is seen as a benefit for students who have access to their school curriculum from home, as well as the ability to post to their blogs from both home and school using digital devices.

Despite the arguments for new opportunities, the use of a digital learning environment has been shown to mean a number of potential barriers to student learning outside school in low-income communities. The most apparent is the barrier of access to devices and the internet: the digital divide, which the schools in this study seek to overcome through the provision of digital devices and community access to wireless internet. However, it is becoming apparent that a second digital divide is also commonly in play. This divide is the disparity of use, where students from lower income communities are more often provided with lower order learning activities and tasks (Attewell, 2001). It may be that this disparity of use plays out as a new version of the well-known Matthew effect in education, where those who have particular knowledge and skills can benefit from them for new learning. If the ability to learn outside school is a feature of digital learning environments, then the second digital divide might not just relate to learning in school, but may well play out at home, where school-based expectations for home learning interact with social issues such as work life, perceptions of child safety, and parental time (Hollingworth, Mansaray, Allen, & Rose, 2011). Moreover, the interaction is likely to be influenced by communication between home and school, given that international evidence suggests that any existing communication issues between home and school are not necessarily altered by digital learning environments (Grant, 2011).

In this study we sought to gather perspectives on out-of-school learning from students who attend schools using a digital learning environment and their teachers and parents. We asked students about school-based activities at home, as well as what they did for fun, what online communication they engaged in, whether they did any online shopping, browsing, and trading, or digital creation of movies, music, or games that might be perceived to benefit school learning, with the caveat that students were free to leave out anything they did not want to tell us about. We wanted to understand what students, their families, and teachers considered to be the sorts of digital activities that occur out of school that might support school success.

Researchers interviewed families about how students engage in learning outside school time. We interviewed 40 families during term 3 (2013), and were able to make contact with and interview 30 of these families again in February 2014, soon after the summer break. Two researchers conducted each interview: one talked with the child; one with the parent (sometimes in the parent’s first language). The families came from six different schools (five primary and one secondary), all of which were using digital learning environments in their teaching. The families were from a range of ethnicities: Tongan (28%), Māori (23%), Samoan (20%), Cook Island (10 %), New Zealand European (10%), Niue (5%) and other Pacific and Asian nations (6%). We also conducted group interviews with teachers from the schools at these same time periods, in an after-school meeting format. We conducted separate focus groups with primary teachers (n = 6 (2013); n = 5 (2014)) and secondary teachers (n = 6 (2013); n = 5 (2014)). The focus-group interviews were transcribed for analysis. Both sets of data were then analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

Findings

Finding 1: Differing perspectives were apparent about the relative merits of formal and informal learning activities

A key finding of our study was that there were differing beliefs among participants about whether learning at home should be primarily formal (through set learning tasks), or informal (through games and leisure activities). Among teachers there were differing beliefs. Some teachers argued that, because students could access school sites from home, students could spend more of their own time on school tasks either explicitly set as homework, or as independent study. This belief was mostly expressed by secondary school teachers whose students were working to complete modules and gain qualification credits. However, there were also a number of primary school teachers who expressed a value for set learning activities for students to complete at home. Others disagreed, arguing that lots of learning can take place through games and leisure activities online, although even these teachers stated that students needed to make wise choices about how they managed their time, perhaps acknowledging the need to balance both formal and informal learning opportunities. One secondary school teacher also mentioned the opportunity for students to seek out additional learning material, and then to share that with the teacher and classmates, therefore taking on the teaching role.

There was also a difference between teachers in the approach they took to managing home learning. The first approach was to set formal activities designated as home learning, often via a specific tab on the class site, which could include links to learning games and recreational reading activities as well as teacher-made tasks. In contrast, other teachers expressed that students should access the class site out-of-school, and use it to engage in school learning independently. These teachers shared their expectation that students keep up with, or finish, school tasks, “so any work that they miss I’d expect that they need to catch that up in their own time”. They expressed the view that there was no need for learning to be divided up between home and school, but that students could access learning activities via the class site anytime. Finally, the group of teachers who advocated more informal learning preferred not to set homework, but to encourage students to learn through recreational digital uses, through either voluntary access through the class site, or through interest-based digital activities.

Whereas teachers had discussed learning in general terms, parents saw potential for their children’s access to the digital learning environment to strengthen traditional skills for school achievement, for example, “literacy and numeracy skills”. In addition, parents mentioned the development of a wider set of digital skills, related to opportunities for engaging in a digital society and economy. In terms of learning-related activities, however, students and parents alike tended to describe the sorts of digital learning at home as “homework”, and assigned specific time to meet the set requirements. Apart from the purposeful time set aside for school-sanctioned homework, a number of parents enforced restrictions around students’ time online. Making sure students spent after school time away from devices was a recurrent theme: “They [children] need a balanced lifestyle. Get outside and use your imagination”; and, “It’s good to balance lifestyle for kids so they don’t spend too much time inside—they need to get outside!”

For parents, activities that were considered homework included research and maintenance or practice sites, games, and programs. Parents also described communication uses (email; online chat; Skype; Twitter) as well as social or personal use (YouTube; Facebook/social networking). Parents typically (68 percent) described such behaviours as learning, but some considered that their children were playing (20 percent) or socialising (8 percent). Activities such as blogging, searching, using maths games and spelling applications were also supported by parents as learning activities if these were set.

Most activities that students reported engaging in were teacher assigned. Students reported engaging in maths practice using sites and apps (38 percent), fiction and non-fiction reading (45 percent), and writing (15 percent). Students also reported posting to a blog, commenting on others’ blogs, and preparing blog posts. Only four students reported socialising on Facebook, streaming music (secondary), or playing games such as Minecraft (primary) as activities they were mainly engaged in after school. These four students reported that they did not consider these activities to be learning-related. Six of the 40 students interviewed were unable to do learning activities at home (due to device or internet connection issues) and were not set any alternative forms of home-learning activities by their teachers, so reported doing nothing in that regard.

Some students reported engaging in self-chosen learning tasks. Twenty-eight percent of students reported that they extended their own learning by writing, reading, or researching beyond what was formally set by the teacher. In some instances, students took initiative to “collaborate with email and on docs”. Almost half of students described doing some form of reading either as research for inquiry or project work, and some mentioned self-directed reading of school journals, chapter books, or library books.

Students identified the value of increased reading mileage. Over half of students (59 percent) maintained that the process of using informational sites and engaging search-related reading helped to promote their learning. There were also students who said that they particularly valued independent reading such as e-books and informational reading. Conversely, relatively few parents of these Year 5–13 students referred to students’ reading in any format in relation to our questions about learning out of school, possibly because the context for the interview was the influence of the digital learning environment.

Engaging in independent pursuit of learning activities outside school required that students had independent digital learning strategies. Like their teachers, the students reported self-regulation as a strategy for increasing learning out of school. For students, self-regulation largely meant managing online distractions. Students also mentioned two other key digital learning strategies: searching online for information or guidance, and online collaboration (with friends or teachers). For many home-learning activities, students were engaged in finding, using, and evaluating information. Students’ descriptions of their strategies for these activities indicated variability in their proficiency with these skills. Despite this, no students reported using any supports, scaffolds, or resources provided by teachers for the use of digital learning strategies, for example search strategies, information literacy strategies or critical literacy strategies, at home. If students noticed difficulties or were stuck, they reported seeking help from parents or siblings. Where such help was not available, or family members could not solve the issue, students reported shutting down and waiting to consult the teacher or peers the next day.

Finding 2: While parents and teachers were in agreement about the role of parents to support students to make wise decisions about engaging in an online environment, less clear was what role parents might take in supporting learning.

When asked how parents could support learning at home, teachers most often mentioned the expectation that families support children to care for digital devices to prevent breakages and to be actively involved in “keeping the child safe online”. Families were therefore expected by teachers to monitor appropriate use, and to make sure their children were interacting positively and going only to appropriate sites.

Families concurred with this, describing a key role as supervising which sites their children were accessing at home. Parents were also aware of what teachers termed “smart” internet use, avoiding negative interactions with peers and monitoring who their children were communicating with. Strategies for this included: “Use the netbook where you can see it”; telling students “not to go on bad site[s]”; and “monitor kids online and be careful of sites kids visit”. A number of parents mentioned tracking students by reviewing their internet browsing history, although one parent mentioned that “Kids are clever they know how to delete history online”.

For learning digitally, teachers reported that they wanted parents to “take an interest” in what their children were learning at school. Using the digital learning environment, taking an interest might include such specific activities as viewing students’ schoolwork using the class site, reading students’ blogs, and discussing or commenting on students’ blogs. In general, the students were expected to show their parents what they did at school; parents were expected to discuss the students’ blog posts and, where these were set, assist with assigned tasks.

When teachers were asked about their role in supporting the learning at home, most reported that communication with families was led by their schools, rather than individual teachers. Teachers reported that schools offered information to families about their expectations for home learning. Some sent home written notices; others offered evening sessions at which messages about expectations were delivered. In some cases, however, there was an acknowledgement that parents were not offered enough advice on how to support students’ learning at home. One teacher finished the group interview by commenting that the discussion with the researcher and colleagues had provoked her to go back to her own school and begin a conversation about how well they were involving parents in discussions about home learning using the digital learning environment.

Most advice about the digital learning environment that parents reported receiving from schools was tool related. Parents reported being given advice by the school about how to access class sites, blogs, download learning material, and how to navigate the blog sites so that they could post a comment to a blog. Of the forty parents interviewed, four reported being given advice about how to support learning, such as discussing content and tasks, getting students to share what they were learning, or making contributions by commenting, reviewing, and encouraging thinking. One parent suggested that getting children to show their online creations “opens communication and dialogue about what your child is learning”. On the other hand, most parents reported that they had had not received any advice about supporting learning. Some also perceived a lack of information about the effect that the digital learning environment was having: “School didn’t tell you how it was affecting our kids and learning ”.

Students perceived that parents provided guidance by supervising homework (50 percent). Support for homework included ensuring completion (“Makes sure I finish my work”), checking in (“They come in to ask what I’m doing”), time monitoring (“If it’s been too long Mum tells me to go outside with the boys”) and, importantly, encouraging effort: “Don’t give up, keep trying, doesn’t matter if we get it wrong. Parents give strength to carry on with work”. Twenty per cent of students reported parent advice that concerned appropriate online behaviour, particularly bans on Facebook (“Rule—not to go on Facebook. I’m too young”) and not going to “bad sites” or doing “bad stuff”. However, another 20 percent did report direct parental involvement in discussion, questioning or clarification, and review. Students who did mention receiving advice or assistance from parents described traditional parental actions, such as “testing my basic facts”, recommending book reading, and giving activities to do, such as extra maths equations. Three students described showing their completed work to a parent, and one mother “proofreads and then I blog it”. Support for digital activity was described as “helping me search it up”.

Discussion: What should home-learning activities look like in the digital environment, and how should parents support these?

The shift to a digital learning environment has engendered a lot of discussion about how teaching and learning might look different in the 21st century and allow close connections with communities (e.g., Bolstad & Gilbert, 2012), however there is less discussion about how this shift might affect students’ home learning and parental involvement in that learning.

While there is disagreement among researchers about the value of homework, there is more support for the value of parents being involved in their children’s education (Brooking, 2007; Biddulph, Biddulph, & Biddulph, 2003; Epstein et al 2009; Jeynes, 2011). In addition to direct involvement with the school, a key form of this support is what parents do at home with their children; including conveying aspirations, setting rules and organisational routines, communicating with children about school and assisting with homework (Fan and Chen, 2001; Finn, 1998). Our findings indicate that the parents in our study were engaged in their children’s learning in each of these ways, but that a potential barrier to these forms of support was lack of clarity about learning in a digital environment, what that meant for the sorts of activities children should engage in at home, and what they as parents should do to support their children.

Home-learning activities

For students with access to a digital learning environment from home, there are three key ways that home learning might occur: through independent study using curriculum resources (e.g. Davies & Jewitt, 2011; Di Iorio et al., 2006), through more informal learning (Trinidad & Broadley, 2008) and through homework activities set by teachers (Kerawalla et al, 2007). Our interviews with teachers suggested that different teachers valued each of these types of activities differently. Whereas some set explicit homework, others expected children to stay up to date, and others expected that children learn through interest-based digital activities. While each of these approaches may be valuable, the expectation for home learning was most aligned with what parents and students reported in cases where students had explicit homework tasks to complete. A key site for parental involvement in children’s learning is setting of rules and organisational routines, and discussing and assisting with homework (Fan & Chen, 2001). Parents in our study expressed the value they placed on learning by setting routines around homework, time on screen and the importance of a balance of after-school activities. Where homework tasks were set, parents supported these by supervising, encouraging, checking, and sometimes assisting. For those families where children were not set specific home-learning tasks by their teachers, or where children reported being up to date, time playing for extended periods on digital devices was often discouraged. In practice then, a teacher’s belief in the value of informal or interest-led learning, rather than teacher-set tasks, might have created a potential constraint to learning if the lack of set tasks was interpreted as “no homework”. Arguably, in such a case, a lack of clear messages about home-learning activities works in unintended ways to inhibit a key site for parental involvement in children’s learning. Explicit communication from schools about types of valuable home-learning activities and how much time to spend doing them might allow parents to enact key parental involvement roles of conveying the value of learning, setting routines and organisation for learning, discussing learning, and assisting with learning.

While setting clear messages about home learning might remove some of the barriers to parental involvement, the nature of the home-learning activities themselves also warrants discussion. New Zealand and international researchers argue that the digital environment opens opportunities for more personalised, independent learning (Bolstad & Gilbert, 2012; Livingstone & Helsper, 2007; Roschelle, Pea, Hoadley, Gordon, & Means, 2000). However, an international equity concern is that in the digital learning environment, a second digital divide might operate if children in low-decile schools get fewer opportunities to engage in the more cognitively demanding learning activities (Attewell, 2001). Somewhat countering this concern, the students in our study reported engaging in practice sites and games, but also researching, reading and blog-posting; in summary, a combination of what might be considered higher and lower order tasks. For those students engaged in some of the more cognitively challenging activities, digital learning strategies were key to their success, and unsurprisingly, there was variation between students in strategies they reported using, for example, in managing distractions, searching, finding information, and collaborating. Two implications arise. The first is to consider how home-learning activities might be conceived so that all students have equal opportunity to engage in the sorts of higher order learning that are argued to be possible in a digital environment. The second is to support students to engage in that learning independently. If a key affordance of home learning in the digital environment is through personalisation of learning pursuits, then the implication is a need to legitimise and support these sorts of learning opportunities by providing resources and activities which develop these skills. In addition to addressing the second digital divide, for a small number of students in our study, the first digital divide—that is, access to the internet or device and hence the class site—was an issue. Therefore, there is also a need to consider alternative activities for those students so that these inequities in digital access are not magnified by lack of access to learning.

Family involvement

One of the key themes discussed in terms of future-oriented learning is the need to consider “changing the script” (Bolstad & Gilbert, 2012, p. 4) by rethinking teachers’ and students’ roles. Our data suggest that there are implications of this change for parental involvement as well. As discussed, the parents we interviewed described their involvement in students’ learning, through traditional means such as communicating aspirations, setting routines, and assisting with homework. In addition to these traditional roles, the digital environment meant that parents also needed to be involved in making sure their children were making wise decisions about their use of sites and communication online. Less clear to parents was how to engage in their children’s learning in new ways given the digital nature of their activities.

A key affordance of the digital learning environment in the schools that we studied was the use of blogs for students to post artefacts of learning. Teachers expressed a desire that these sites allow parents more opportunity to know what students were learning at school. Parents were seen as a key intended audience for students’ learning creations, and teachers expressed a desire that parents take an interest in the students’ creations. The specific activities implied might be that parents view the blogs with their children, ask them to explain the learning that had occurred, judge how well they had understood, ask questions about the learning, and make links to prior experiences (although this was not explicitly stated). Home learning in this view involves students engaging in discussion with parents and families, possibly explaining their emerging understandings of concepts, and reprocessing the content as students try to explain to others about what they have been learning. Thus, like the new role for teachers and learners commonly advocated in digital learning environment, it may be that teachers were expressing a new focus on a less task-based and more conversational role for parents also. If that is so, then what this role looks like, how it is best enacted, and how it supports students’ learning needs to be articulated clearly to communities where parental involvement in school-based learning may have been enacted through traditional means, such as setting routines, communicating expectations, overseeing, and supporting homework.

Conclusion: Developing shared understandings to reconsider learning at home in the digital learning environment

Parental involvement in learning is commonly conceived as a strength or deficiency of particular families (Lewis, Kim and Bey, 2001), however, studies into parental involvement highlight the influence that schools can have in creating shared and aligned visions, goals, and approaches, given that home and school are both primary spheres of influence for children’s learning (Epstein et al, 2009). More recently, the role of individual teachers in reaching out to families and involving them in home-learning activities has been found to influence levels of parents’ involvement (Lewis, Kim & Bey, 2011). Combined with this, new digital learning environments within both the traditional spheres of home and school mean that existing expectations and roles, and even existing advice, may need renegotiating for a new environment. The findings from our interviews with parents, teachers and children suggest that there is a need to develop shared understandings about the home-learning activities that children will most benefit from within a digital learning environment. Our findings also suggest that the parents’ role in these new learning activities also needs to be communicated so that parents are invited into the process of learning and offered the opportunity to be involved.

Acknowledgement

The present study was made possible through funding by the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative.

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Dr Rebecca Jesson is associate director of the Woolf Fisher Research Centre at the University of Auckland Faculty of Education and Social Work. Her research is situated in schools and their communities and is focused on literacy learning and teaching. Rebecca’s research is driven by finding effective ways to support schools and teachers to realise educational success for students in low SES communities.

Email: r.jesson@auckland.ac.nz

Maria Meredith is a PhD candidate at the Woolf Fisher Research Centre with a background in adult education. Maria’s research investigates family and whānau engagement in schools and in family literacy practices.

Naomi Rosedale is a researcher at the Woolf Fisher Research Centre. Naomi is a trained secondary teacher and is currently undertaking a PhD in education to investigate how children’s 1-to-1 digital practices influence their learning in classroom and in out-of-school settings.