Slashdot Mirror
Children Using Technology Have Better Literacy Skills
eldavojohn writes "A UK study of three thousand children aged nine to sixteen suggests something that may not come as a shock to geeks: using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, 'The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.' And for those of us worried about a world of 'tl;dr' and 'Y U H8n?' the research claims that 'text speech' does not damage literacy. The biggest shortcoming of this research is that it appears the children graded their own writing in that their methodology was an online survey designed to ask the children which technology they use and then follow up with asking them how well they write to determine which children have better literacy skills."
I can say I'm amazing at intercourse, but it doesn't make it so.
If I were to ask people what kind of technology they use and then ask them how well they hold their liquor, without testing the second half, then I haven't really done any research at all, have I? No. This could just as easily have said "children who use technology tend to think they're way smarter than everyone else." It may turn out to be true, but that doesn't mean the research is actually valid. Just sayin'.
...that's what she said.
Childrren who used Facebook and MySpace were actually dumber for it.
There is also a correlation between wealth and access to technology. And a correlation between wealth and literacy.
Neither the BBC article nor the researchers make this claim. They just say that it is correlated with better literacy.
An online survey isn't science, (If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane). The summary itself exposes the falacy right out ("...may not come as a shock to geeks"). The geeks are the ones more likely to be filling out an online survey in the first place. Not to mention the obvious class differences between those who have ready access to lots of technology vs those who don't and what that implies about their neighborhoods and schools. There's all kinds of variables that arent being controlled for.
Reading ability also increases with shoe size.
rofl omg i been usin tech 4 a looooooong time since i wuz a kid now i read good but my boss tellz me not to send emails and memos nemore cuz no1 can read em lol!!!1
I no. this story iz so tru. i c ug apps 4 my college that luk lik this. way smart
This is not merely a shortcoming, it is a devastating hole that renders the study utterly useless. This has to be about the dumbest survey I've ever heard of. No conclusions can be drawn from a self-assessment of ones own ability. Other research has shown a correlation between lack of ability and overestimation of ability in self-assessment.
The biggest shortcoming of this research is that it appears the children graded their own writing in that their methodology was an online survey designed to ask the children which technology they use and then follow up with asking them how well they write to determine which children have better literacy skills
So, really, the only conclusion we can draw from this is that 'the more technology one uses, the better they think their literacy is." Great.
I've noticed that since being online my spelling has improved tremendously. As a kid growing up I always had much difficulty with spelling/grammar, but in a world of red squiggly lines misspelled words become hard to ignore. I know most people say that spell check ruins people's ability to spell, however I'd argue the opposite.
I had a period of time between school and the rise of blogging where I didn't write as much. And I guess my writing skills languished. I think they've improved now. I probably dont write long essays or papers as well because I haven't been doing that in a long time.
I thought slashdot ran a story on the Dunning-Kruger effect fairly recently. Am I imagining things?
Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as "good" or "very good", while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same.
It is baffling as to why anyone even bothered running this survey. Even if we assume that these kids are not intentionally lying, studies have shown that people generally tend to rate themselves as above average. To paraphrase these studies:
Idiots do not realize they are stupid. (If you don't know there are 2 homophones of "there," then you won't know if you're using it wrong.)
Exceptionally intelligent types underestimate how much smarter they are than Joe-average ("I can't be the only one who thought that was easy")
And Joe-average tends to think he's Joe-average+1. (No one wants to be average.)
I can't seem to come up with the name for the effect (named for the researchers who observed it), but I'm fairly sure there's research out there that suggests that people who have great confidence in their performance on cognitive tests disproportionately tend to have scored poorly. In short, stupid people don't know that they're stupid.
Kids can afford to use different media because thier parents can afford it.
To some extent, wealth is correlated with education.
Certainly the most obvious causal factor for language skills is the amount of language skills their parents exhibit. Those are correlated with both education and wealth.
It may not be the toys, but the parents.
using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, 'The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.' And for those of us worried about a world of 'tl;dr' and 'Y U H8n?'
I don't know about literary skills, but I see an abundance of wrong spellings of words that don't have the right meaning but phonetically are almost the same. An example is 'of' instead of 'have'. E.g. someone may write "he would of done this" instead of "he would have done this". Probably caused by trying to write too fast and not thinking about what they wrote, and that's a phenomenon that I've only seen the last 4 years or so (I think I first spotted this in a subtitle for Torchwood. I almost couldn't believe my eyes, that such a mistake was made by the BBC). If that time estimate is correct for when this sort of thing started, then possibly technology, or probably better the entire lifestyle (fast paced, short attention span, exacerbated by TV's ads that interrupt programs) in the west these days, may be the cause of this.
I have found that the worst drivers I know, always seem to believe that they are fantastic drivers, and that all the collisions they get into are all other peoples fault.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I wholeheartedly made the effort to get into third place today. It appears that my dreams have become reality. Thus, in the way that I have made this tertiary post, I have divined myself beyond a modest man's wildest dreams and into the oblivion of happiness.
Everyone already knows that Linux users hold their liquor better than anyone else. I bet it has something to do with all that free beer I keep hearing about.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Automatic spell-checking does not add to literacy skills. I've never heard of a nine year old kid that has said something like "Wow, I just learned (from MS Word) that SOSAGE is spelled SAUSAGE correctly. " Of course, all the emoticons like "^^ :-) :o T.T" do not improve their literacy skills either.
If you write blogs about "stoopid school" and "teechers sucks a$$", this won't improve your literacy skills. If you write something like this "lfg 2dd +tank UBRS rly fast run gogo" - not improving anything...
Most kids copy and paste their homework from Wikipedia. They don't even bother to improve themselves. "New Technology" makes them really dependable.
BBC Quote: "They see enormous advantages in the relationship between teacher and child. Sometimes the computer is closer to the child than the teacher by the age of 13."
-> The computer is closer to the child than the parents. Side effect of our time. Don't wonder, if the computer/ the web programmes the child and not vice versa.
http://www.starfall.com/ is a website that can significantly help your pre-schooler and early reader improve their literacy, based on my son's experience with it. (More self-reporting bias?) I first learned about this site on slashdot a couple of years ago, and it is so good, I want to make sure it is shared.
Study finds that toddlers who spend all their time on slashdot are much smarter than the average toddler. Well I knew that.
techonoly & chillern in interweb has litature skillz.
Source(s) - http://ask.yahoo.com//
can someone explain the article i didnt understand
From the article...
Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as "good" or "very good", while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same.
I believe that a lower number of children feel good or very good about their writing, because w/o an online audience, their only likely critic would be their school teacher. Teachers are more likely to be critical of writing, with the hope that their constructive criticism encourages students to correct mistakes to improve writing skills.
On the other hand, bloggers are more likely to get critiqued by their peers. Peer reviews are much more likely to be positive in nature (with likely comments including "LOL" and "dudz ur sooooooooooooooooooooo funy"), with few to no comments involving constructive criticism.
As such, those who are reviewed by teachers get less positive feedback, leading them to feel less confident about their writing skills, and those who are reviewed online by peers get much more (though empty) positive feedback, inflating their self-esteem and making them feel more confident about their writing.
But in no way, shape, or form, does this survey (anyone who tries to call this a "study" needs to go to college to learn what a real study looks like) prove that kids + technology = better writing.
If the authors mean by literacy the ability to read, rather than express oneself, I can see how this would be true. Technology alone, as of yet, does not have an adequate means for providing feedback on written communication. I work in part on an automated essay evaluator, and getting a computer to provide meaningful and contextualized feedback is extremely difficult.
There are statistical techniques to analyze the contribution of multiple variables to a result, and social scientists routinely use these techniques to control for confounding factors like wealth.
For example, a typical study on something racism will claim something like, say, that after controlling for wealth and education, black people get worse deals on mortages; that is, the study will use statistical techniques to isolate the contribution of the three variables (race, wealth and education). A typical dumbass that doesn't like the conclusion of the study, however, will claim that the study is invalid because blacks are poorer and less educated than whites, and poorer people get worse mortgage deals. Which is, of course, a strawman, because the statistical techniques used in these studies are normally designed to compare people who have similar wealth and education but different race.
I certainly can't vouch for the study that's mentioned in this article, but I somehow doubt that you're any more ready to vouch against it.
Are you adequate?
Perhaps the survey should have been titled: "Those who like to write tend to be better writers."
The survey designers have put the cart before the horse. The students are not better writers because of their use of new technology, but use new technology because they are better writers and well . . . like to write.
Think about it. Have you ever met a blogger that didn't enjoy writing?
I see this all the time in my classroom. The kids who write better produce more finished copy, and write more often as well. When we type our papers in the computer lab the better writer will complete one paper in the time their neighbor (the poor writer) has typed one sentence. . . and changed the font 43 times.
And in English literature, instead of writing an essay analyzing the drama structure of a play we read in class, you will have to "text a friend about that thing we read"
That and you're hardly likely to get a person, be they kid or adult, to respond that they were atrocious at writing, or for that matter atrocious at anything. At best you'd get a neutral response, or something like, "Well, I'm not Shakespeare, but I get by." Also, I wonder if the people running the study had considered that way too many colleges have to run remedial English classes to incoming students who's first language is English. Well, some of those are American ;) But they don't count. It's the English that can't speak, read and write English at all well that's a bit more of a concern. Suffice to say, if University students are horrible at English, then it's somewhat safe to say that the general population is worse than those heading into degree studies.
Fact is, wealthy kids have more access to technology. Wealth generally equals better language skills. Enough to create a marked correlation. Period. This is true if only because the wealthy define what "literacy skills" are. Always have, and until wealth no longer matters, always will.
They used to think that such benefits of wealth were the product of "good breeding" in jolly old England. They were wrong. Being well fed, having opportunities, and living in a community where you weren't in fear of your life, and in this case with individual tutors to teach you your subjects and surrounded by people with equivalent training, was what caused "literacy," not genetics.
It's the same case here, but a different false cause. If you regularly "blog, text or use social networking websites," you fall into the all-important "wealthier than 80% of the people on the planet" category, and that makes all the difference. Remove "texting" from your criteria and you're in probably clear into the 95th percentile.
(Oh, and side note, sample size? Only 3001 respondents?! Really.)
Correlative studies of this sort are a waste of time. As in: Forgone conclusion, unspecified causative link, completely subjective measurements. It would be as useful to say that warm water feels less wet than cold, and is therefore not as wet, and that heating water makes it less potent.
--
Toro
Noone is good at writing long essays anymore. But at the same time essays are getting more enlarged, expanded, extensive, outstretched and their wording becomes more sophisticated, refined, schooled, experienced. - Often quite in contrast to the skills of the submitting author or other parts of the same essay.
Bitch about results from research being "obvious," as if looking into it doesn't serve a purpose.
See, there's this thing called a "hypothesis" which is a guess (usually pretty well informed) about how something might work. Then - and I know this sounds just totally crazy - but then you *test* that hypothesis by collecting data that's relevant. Insane, right? But that whole process is kind of a big deal as far as the whole "science" thing goes, if you're at all into that.
About the "obviousness" of it... My father thinks it's "obvious" that kids who use technology are sub-literate morons because they send texts like "OMG IDK MY BFF JILL" and don't know how to use proper capitalization and spelling in email due to a reliance on spell-check and a "close enough is good enough" mentality. Gosh, if only there were some way to test one "obvious" idea against another completely opposed "obvious" idea!
This is a site largely frequented by nerds. I would expect a bit more scientific literacy, but "obviously" that's just not the case here. I guess eldavojohn is "obviously" a moron.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
FTFA:
Since relatively little is known about young people’s views about writing in the UK, the key objectives of this survey were: to explore how much young people enjoy writing, what type of writing they engage in, how good at writing they think they are and what they think about writing.
The survey wasn't meant to find out how good kids are at writing. It was meant to find out if kids are engaging in writing. The article points out that a vast majority of children ages 9-16 write regularly and that most enjoy the task when they can choose the topic. The self-evaluation part that everyone seems to be denigrating is meant to highlight the fact that about half of the children surveyed have confidence in their writing skills. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that they're objectively good writers. That's not the point of the study. But it does mean that a majority of them are comfortable with writing, which is extremely important. I know some of you are going to throw out the old hackneyed standby, "Correlation is not causation," and that's fine. If you want to claim that practicing the skill of written communication on a regular basis is merely correlated to being more effective at communicating via the written word, then that's your prerogative. And for you grammar nazis out there, to frantically fret over split infinitives and to avoid prepositions to end your clauses with are practices just as arbitrary as choosing to spell 'later' as 'l8r' (perhaps more so, as the latter at least has efficiency on its side). Grammar is a social phenomenon, not a linguistic one. Is you understanding what I be saying? The syntax is there, and that's all that matters for effective communication (for all you linguists, I freely admit that my grasp of AAVE is less than stellar). The rest is fluorish (I understand that speaking AAVE in, say, a job interview may be somewhat of a turn-off to potential employers, but that really is just a prejudice of the employers). Alright, lecture over.
Has anyone pointed out that this was an ONLINE survey? I suspect that puts those who don't use technology at something of a disadvantage.
"Tell me about it.. a self-selecting group of people grade themselves? How on earth is that scientific?"
Happens all the time, it's called peer review.
+5 insightfull? - I would like to think the mods were refering to the title of your post but somehow I doubt it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I know it's cheating but I read the abstract, there survey was not intended to measure literacy.
Quote - "The key objectives of this survey were therefore: to explore how much young people enjoy writing, what type of writing they engage in, how good at writing they think they are, what they think about writing and what the role of technology is in young people's writing." (my emph)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Most of the others are complaining about the fact that the results are self-selected."
Is that really a fact? I pointed out in another post that the survey was not intended to measure literacy. Reading the abstract again I also doubt they were self selecting. Here is the relevant quote with highlights...
The key objectives of this survey were therefore: to explore how much young people enjoy writing, what type of writing they engage in, how good at writing they think they are, what they think about writing and what the role of technology is in young people's writing. This report outlines the findings from 3001 pupils aged 9-16 from England and Scotland, who completed an online survey in May 2009.
Now someone might want to dig into the pdf report and contradict me but the word "pupils" seems to indicate they were asked to fill this out in class time, ie: not self selected.
I know that it's geek herasy not to burn social scientists at the stake but I'm a bit of a softy.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I know the old correlation is not causation thing, but I owe a great deal of my improvement to being online. I started using BBSes when I was in my early teens and quickly found that to be respected, one had to learn to write better. It didn't take me long before I adjusted to that particular climate and what decades of public school never accomplished occurred in me a few weeks to a few months. Before long, my first draft of anything was nearly equal to my final draft and often was.
I'm not going to say that's going to be the case today. The climate is different now. People are more tolerant of errors and bad grammar. My own older sons are not quite the English language scholar that I was at their age and they are quite active online... but then again, their activities are largely on chat rooms and social networking sites.
Once again, correlation not being causation, but as my desire to be heard and understood within the environment I grew up in was my motivation. The environment is different now but I can't imagine the motivation changing much at all.
"Peer review" is the other name of "inbreeding".
The average 9-16 spends literally hours every evening on msn, face book and the like.
If I told my secondary school teacher I was spending that amount of time reading and writing she would have jumped for joy!
The grammar and syntax used by most are not really that bad (certainly no worse than the average article written in any of the British newspapers aimed at adults).
Yes we complain they use acronyms and deliberately misspell words for time saving -
but isn't that simply evolution of the language? (And what the apostrophe was invented to do) of which we are all guilty of?
A quick poll in the office shows two of the 15 professionals I work with actually know what I.T. stands for despite it being a regularly used term of which few mis-understand.