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."

Comments

Well, no shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Without a computer you have to learn how to think.

Re:Well, no shit

[WrongSizeGlass]

higher test scores != learning more

More and more school districts and states are moving towards using standardized tests to measure "learning". If you only teach students to score well on those tests then they aren't "learning" as much as they are "memorizing facts". Teaching kids how to think, critical thinking, reasoning, etc will benefit them (and the rest of us) much more in the long run ... there just aren't any easy ways to measure that kind of performance.

You teach a kid 'how to think' and then sit them in front of 'World of Goo', 'Gears', etc and you'll see they can 'think'.

Re:Well, no shit

[blankinthefill]

Standardized test scores are not, in and of themselves, evil. They are actually pretty useful tools for measuring the performance a student is capable of when used in moderation. It's the increasing focus put on standardized testing in the US that is creating the problem. When everything from school funding to teacher performance is dependent on these tests, it becomes more and more important for the SCHOOL how the kids do on the test. This leads to a huge increase in teaching specifically to the test, from what types of questions will be on it to testing techniques. There is also a lot of pressure on students to perform well. This leads to less general teaching, which would allow most students to pass the test just fine, and give better numbers, and more teaching to the test, which is good for the scores on one test, and good for the school, but terrible for the student.

Re:Well, no shit

[kvezach]

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.

from the article

[mikesd81]

what it boils down to:

Vigdor and Ladd concluded that home computers are put to more productive use in households where parental monitoring is more effective. In disadvantaged households, parents are less likely to monitor children’s computer use and guide children in using computers for educational purposes.

Re:from the article

[ShakaUVM]

>>In disadvantaged households, parents are less likely to monitor children's computer use and guide children in using computers for educational purposes.

Which is why the entire digital divide issue is stupid, in my opinion.

Unless a kid is growing up without any exposure to computers at all, he'll be technologically proficient by the time he graduates. Study after study show that using technology often hurts, instead of helps, student performance.

I say this as someone who teaches teachers how to use technology in the classroom, and I start every lecture by saying, "Only use it when there's a damn good reason to do so."

And there *are* good reasons to do so. Sometimes. But the way that most schools use computers is nothing short of neglect.

Re:from the article

[commodore64_love]

I find there's often no good reason to use a computer. I see people with their $200 PalmPilots and it takes them twice as long to make notes as I do with a free pencil-and-paper. I see students carry laptops into classsrooms and same deal - they are slower than old fashioned note taking

Internet-capable devices are good for lookups of wikipedia, but I doubt that's needed in a classroom setting below grade 9. The computer becomes a way to goof-off.

The focus has to be on guiding students

[brunes69]

Young children are thirsty for knnowledge. Anyone who has had any exposure to a 6-8 year old in the "why daddy" stage knows this. The problem is this is not fostered in many kids. If, at this stage, children are taught how to answer their own questions, using the tools available to them, then it will foster a lifetime of learning.

This is what my parents did with me, although in my day it was "why don't you go get the encyclopedia and we will look it up together?". Nowadays it should be "why don't we go look at the computer together". Guided by a parent, from a YOUNG AGE, this helps in several ways

- It teaches kids that, if they have questions, the materials are available to help them. They don't have to sit in ignorance just because they don't know the answer.

- It teaches kids how to find information when they need it

- It teaches kids how to think critically about that information, and discard the good from the bad.

 

No quite

[arpad1]

It's not the computer that's at fault but the people who are responsible for the idea.

The "activists" contribute their moral outrage but don't much care if the kids actually get an education. It's the opportunity to display moral outrage that's the pay off for the activists. If the kids don't learn anything that's another opportunity to display moral outrage.

The politicians want to look like they're doing something and preferably with other people's money - getting something for nothing, even something useless, is politically worthwhile. Does it matter if the kids learn? Obviously not.

There's really only one group that has an unquestionable claim to be concerned primarily with education and that's the parents. They're not consulted because they might ask uncomfortable questions like "Will the computer do anything worthwhile?" Neither the activists nor the politicians are interested in having to answer questions like that.

Computers are tools, not miracles

[whizbang77045]

We somehow take technology, and expect miracles from it, far beyond what the users are capable of doing. Computers are tools, and they are only going to produce what the users are willing to invest in them of their time and effort. Disadvantaged kids need to learn how to study and investigate, before they will be able to use a computer to its potential as a learning aid. If they don't read or investigate now, computers aren't going to produce some sort of overnight change.

Ender's game

[roman_mir]

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

This shows the uselessness of test scores

[mantis2009]

What's more important in life? Computer skills or getting high test scores?

Re:This shows the uselessness of test scores

[jimmyfrank]

definitely getting high... oh nm