Muhlenberg athletes are spending the summer of 2024 enjoying fantastic experiences on campus, in their hometowns, across the country and even around the world.

When rising junior cross country and track & field runner Isabelle Hoffman was doing her fieldwork at Lower Macungie Middle School during the Fall 2023 semester, she couldn't help but notice that technology — a necessity for online education during the pandemic — was still being used extensively to teach mathematics.

"It was always work on the laptop and homework on the laptop," she recalls. "And I remember thinking in my head, 'I always did math on pen and paper and I grasped the concepts so easily.' I was interested to see if technology was really helping students learn and prepare them for when they graduate high school, or if it's actually something we should start decreasing in the classroom."

The result is a summer research project titled The Impact Technology Has on Secondary School Students; Preparing Them for Higher Education. Under the direction of Sally Richwine, senior lecturer and director of fieldwork programs in the education department, Hoffman received a grant for an eight-week study centered around the experiences of college history professors and secondary education social studies teachers.

Hoffman, a history major who aspires to become a high school social studies teacher, began by reviewing scholarly articles on the subject, which frequently focused on how students were feeling. Seeking to get the perspective of the educators, she then distributed surveys to and set up interviews with her subjects.

As the early results came in, one surprising find was that younger teachers expressed concern that technology was being overused in their classrooms.

That "was a big shock to both me and my faculty advisor, because we thought that older teachers were going to say that they want less technology in the classroom and younger teachers would be okay with it," she says. "One of those teachers who is [in their] first year said that they want to change their entire curriculum to have less technology."

Hoffman is particularly concerned with the potential for students to develop into independent learners, which she defines as those who have the ability to learn on their own, without as much assistance from their teachers or professors. Technology may have taken away some of the student autonomy, in several areas.

For one, the ease of cheating using online resources was a big concern expressed in the survey results. Another issue is that students often have trouble differentiating between reliable online sources and unreliable, biased ones. And then there's the matter of the difficulty of focusing during online classes that are held in environments with a multitude of distractions.

The technology isn't all bad. One example Hoffman gives is that students are now able to access primary sources more readily than in the past. The key is finding the right balance in the use of technology in education settings.

"I think this can help so much, if you can go in when they're creating curriculums and tell them, 'Hey, this is what's working in the classroom and this is what's not working and we need to fix,'" says Hoffman. "I think this will also help relieve teachers and give them a voice in the education system, and make people also realize that we need to help our students become better people.

"I think that's what I'm hoping the outcome is of this research."

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