Slashdot Mirror
Home Computers Equal Lower Test Scores
An anonymous reader writes "Politicians and education activists have long sought to eliminate the 'digital divide' by guaranteeing universal access to home computers, and in some cases to high-speed Internet service. But a Duke University study finds these efforts would actually widen the achievement gap in math and reading scores. Students in grades five through eight, particularly those from disadvantaged families, tend to post lower scores once these technologies arrive in their homes."
Here is the problem.
A child, that is not supervised to do anything that even closely resembles some sort of work on a computer will spend it on whatever this child finds to be the most interesting thing.
There will be many slashdotters here, who will say: "but I grew up with a computer in the house, maybe with more than one computer, and I learned on it."
These people are correct. It is possible to learn with a computer. However their circumstances, like my own, were limited to a small number of things that we could do. I didn't have access to a real computer until about 12, but I was interested in them by reading about them and learning how to do things with them on paper. I made programs and my first programs were some games, I made them on paper and later was able to transfer those into a real machine.
The kids who grew up into /. readers are in their very late twenties to their very late thirties, these had computers in the house in eighties - nineties, we had computers that ran much simpler operating systems and there was not such a clear abundance of actually very user friendly and easy stuff to do, except for pretty good 2D games actually. These kids were obviously from a bit more affluent backgrounds, many saw their parents use computers for work, but this is not necessary.
So these kids, who became interested in the machines, found the most interesting thing to do with their computers was to try and create stuff, to produce things with computer. Sure they plaid games with them, but they also tried writing their own games. They wrote tools, text editors, calculators, drawing programs, they built stuff with computers, added their own extension boards, it was interesting, it was something that could be shown off to the peers, at least to those who cared, so this was also a way to achieve some status among peers.
If at the time the computers were what they are today: very powerful tools with very advanced user interfaces that provided tens of thousands if not millions of different ways to work with the machines plus the ability to socialize in hundreds of ways on line, ability to download music/movies/games within minutes or hours of appearance of new titles, ability to interface with computers through phones and have it all synchronize, if at that time the games looked like they were built by multi-million dollar Hollywood studios, it would have created the perception (maybe partially correct perception) that one person's ability to try and manipulate these complex networked nodes with 3D graphics engines was no longer accessible to a kid.
The operating systems of today go beyond simple DOS so much, that a kid could not do much with those directly because it takes a million of human lives to learn them.
Beside that, there are calculators, wikipedia, sites that offer to do your homework, p2p, where answers can be probably found and downloaded and shared further, there is facebook/myspace/whatever, there are all these tools that can do work for you and there is no TIME for anything between all of the tweets and twats on line. Though we did have chatrooms, BBSs and IRCs.
I think the Ender's game had an idea that made sense, I am sure it's not the only book that had that idea of a network that is created on purpose for education only.
The kids, who have nobody to guide them about how to use the machines they are given for learning at least should be put into position where learning is what they are pushed to through the kind of a computer/network system that they would be allowed to use.
The computers for kids that are expected to learn something, should be different from the 'normal' today's machines, they should be simpler in terms of software/hardware interaction, at least there should be a way to switch between a full crazy modern OS and a simple OS for learning about how the computers work. The network should be designed for learning. There should be things to do in it that would not give out answers but that would pro
You can't handle the truth.
The distortion of standardized test scores as they are applied for optimization purposes is just another example of Campbell's law. When it becomes important to optimize the score, the score gets optimized even at the expense of what it was supposed to measure. As you say, the score may be sensible enough on its own, but optimization twists it.