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8 percent of students indicated that their instructors "understand technology and fully integrate it into their classes."

74 percent of higher education instructors polled indicated that they "incorporate technology into every class or nearly every class," and 67 percent said they were "satisfied with their technology professional development."

The report also found that students now more than ever are using technology regularly in preparation for class: 81 percent of them this year said they use technology every day before class to prepare compared with 63 percent last year.

Several years ago, a small group of faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington decided to do something about the problem. The key, they concluded, was to construct every history course around two core skills of their discipline: assembling evidence and interpreting it.

The historians at Indiana have tried to help students through several specific bottlenecks by dividing large concepts into smaller, evidence-related steps. (See the box below.)

"Students come into our classrooms believing that history is about stories full of names and dates," says Arlene J. Díaz, an associate professor of history at Indiana who is one of four directors of the department's History Learning Project, as the redesign effort is known. But in courses, "they discover that history is actually about interpretation, evidence, and argument."