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Do Home Computers Help Or Hinder Education?
theodp writes "The NY Times reports on economists' efforts to measure a home computer's educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts. Abroad, researchers found that children in Romanian households who won a $300 voucher to help them buy computers received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian. Stateside, students in a North Carolina study posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers increased. And a Texas study found that 'there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.'"
What struck me is that kids gained nothing _but_ computer skills. This ought to challenge computer game designers: can you come up with a game that kids will want to play AND increases math and reading scores? I'm not talking about an "educational" game, per se, just a game whose side effect is better reasoning and comprehension. Even kids who read silly novels are learning something that is useful for school. Why not gamers?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
... why aren't you doing better?
Like anyone can even know that
Kids are spending too much time on those darn newfangled computer thingys and it's rotting their brains. I say we ban them all!
Someone save me from this sanity.
Three groups or cohorts of students were included in this study, with Cohort 1 followed for four years, Cohort 2 for three years, and Cohort 3 for two years (Table 2.2). Cohort 1 (ninth graders) included a total of 5,217 students, with 2,469 treatment students enrolled at high schools and 2,748 control students enrolled at high schools; Cohort 2 (eighth graders) included 5,436 students, with 2,578 at treatment middle schools and 2,858 at control middle schools; and Cohort 3 (seventh graders) included 5,392 students, with 2,547 students at treatment middle schools and 2,845 at control middle schools.
The Romanian study apparently successfully interviewed 858 families in two Romanian counties (Valcea and Covasna). With 1,100 children interviewed and some 1,800 survey sets. Just to put some perspective on how comprehensive each of these reports are. Couldn't get access to the other reports.
Personally I think we're still in a transition period and now that those homes have computers starting when the child is born (and whose parents had computers) we will start to see better parenting skills and regulation with computer usage. It could become just another carrot for the kid or even a method to teach the child proper time management (similar to the classic homework before TV law).
My work here is dung.
It seems on our culture learning is not a process, is a job for theachers. Theres no importance put on teaching people how to learn. About a 50%, maybe a 25% of teaching sould be training people how to learn things.
-Woof woof woof!
The computer is just a tool. I'd think it has no direct effect on education whatsoever. Smart kids with supportive parents will gain a great deal from having a computer. Dumb kids with dumber parents will spend hours on Youtube, twitter etc and learn nothing of consequence.
The UK has just announced a program to get everyone online. However, 20% of school leavers in the UK are functionally illiterate and innumerate. Getting those people online isn't going to benefit anyone, in fact it'll just increase the amount of crap that's already on the Internet.
This was posted last month.
Like most tools computers, or the internet, can both help or harm education. The problem our generation has is that we've decided we can use technology as a substitute for things which that technology is poorly equipped to substitute. Take for example the "smart whiteboards" - outside of TED I have never once in a teaching context seen one of them used well. The fact that even lecturers within technology still use a whiteboard or blackboard should hint to other subject teachers that these aren't magic bullets for improving education.
The funny thing is that in my experience technology is used the worst the more further removed you are from subjects that really understand that technology. For example, in Science, Engineering, and IT you might actually find less computer usage than some classes in English or History which have no place using computers at all. What we essentially have is teachers swinging the technology magic wand like it is a black box that good grades come out of on their own... Very few people that know technology would believe this "black box" magic bull. But naturally there are companies lined up to sell schools software and hardware that might give students great grades just by the school spending money.
Basically people want to "buy" grades and technology is the latest trend in that vein. The old trend was buying teachers silly short courses on various vodo tricks.
Parents just want someone else to raise their kid and they feel less guilty about a computer than a TV or games console. Bad parenting will result in more time spent on 4chan and worse grades.
Unsurprising, and for language skills too as children just spend more time doing stuff on the computer, than properly doing their homework.
What surpises me about todays school education (in the Netherlands) is that programmable graphing calculators are allowed everywhere. If I were a teacher I'd only allow those in perhaps 1 test per year. All else to be done on paper, manually.
When I see my niece who's quite intelligent, she's nowhere near as good at calculating stuff on paper or in her head as she should be. For what I consider te be trivial stuff that I do in my head, she picks up a calculator. And those skills of doing it yourself are important, e.g. to make estimates so you don't blindly trust what the calculator spews out. And those results can be wrong, if you say enter a wrong number somewhere...
In my schooldays, I liked to calculate stuff in my head even though I was a programmable calculator nut (remember the great Casio FX-602P? The excellent but slow HP-41CX?). I did the following trick for example: Someone gave me a calculation that I would then try to give a close estimate to. E.g. 14.6 ^ 2.7. Using various methods I usually got within a few percent. Useless? No, those skills are useful to check calculations. If the outcome is completely different from a manual estimate, somewhere there's a problem...
I remember estimating skills being taught in primary school. At that point they didn't make sense to me, because for me they were too easy, e.g. calculate 125*43. I would just calculate the exact answer, quicker than making an estimate. So estimating needs to be explained too which wasn't done properly then. Only many years later did I see the use of it...
Make of all that what you will, I see no suprises in any event, in the results of the article.
Blaming the computer for Internet distraction isn't correct.
I would be interested to see the effects of putting a computer with educational tools in the home, but WITHOUT INTERNET.
...and ask yourself if you'd be surprised by these results. Most home computers (like TVs) are entertainment devices that are occasionally educational, rather than educational devices that are occasionally entertaining.
Beyond that, fundamental education (language, math, reasoning, general and specific knowledge) is hard and involves study, memorization, drill, and test. People have been hoping for 40 years or so that computers would somehow magically make that go away. Or to paraphrase South Park:
1) Computers in classrooms and homes
2) ?
3) Smart, well-educated kids!
Sorry, doesn't work that way. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
18 minutes TED talk video Clifford Stoll where he touches on computers in the classrooms (and many many many other things): http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html
He's a fun watch.
BBC coverage of one laptop per child in Uruguay
I think it has to do with the age of the child (NYTimes article describes research experience with teenagers in North Carolina, BBC covers internet give to primary school age children at the schools in Uruguay). The research NYTimes profiles also shows an apparent difference according to the race of the teenager who gets broadband. Could it be that test scores have anything to do with anything else other than computer access? They need a control group, e.g. a country the size of Uruguay where they distribute Nintendo's and "Grand Theft Auto" instead of computers. My theory: prepubescents who get their online access at a public school (Uruguay) spend time accessing different educational websites than teenagers given broadband access in their rooms (NC).
Gently reply
I am fond of the idea of using computers and modern tools to teach. To this end, I wanted to write an educational film short to help teach children about chemistry. Though I don't necessarily feel that educators should be entertainers, I do feel that "stealth learning" has its benefits. One approach is to use film and modern media to instruct:
In this screenplay, the Starship Voyager is critically low on dilithium crystals. They discover an arctic planet with Tundra-like conditions. Seven-of-Nine is dispatched to fix the extractor in an old mine near an acidic beach that contains tons of dilithium (thought to be a waste product from a previous civilization). There is an explosion and the mine collapses. Racing against time, they rush a small tunnel to Seven-of-Nine to provide air. The soils are highly acidic, however and poses a threat. The good doctor proposes that they use calcium hydroxide to counteract the dangerous acidity in the soils. Janeway demands that, as the Captain, she should do this task. They race against time because the advance welcoming party is starting to fall victim to the frozen conditions. The captain transports down to the surface to begin. One could say that Captain Janeway's on shore, all the greeters are cold, and she's liming the airway to Seven.
In all cases, the kids in homes with computers improved their ...
One would almost think that the main purposed of giving poor kids access to computers at home should be to increase their computer skills (given that in today's and future society one can pretty much forget about any kind of specialized non-physical work if one doesn't have computer skills).
That said, what these studies seem to indicate is how important some form of supervision is for limiting the negative impact of computers (i.e. increase in time wasted on leisure activities) for kids.
I bet if a study was done involving getting TVs for TV-less poor families with kids, we would get the same negative results without the positive one.
Computing as a field is rife with spectacularly good examples of where solutions keep on being developed without any consideration of how they're going to solve a problem - or indeed if there is a problem, or if the problem lends itself to being solved with a computer.
I can't help but feel this is similar. I'm sure I remember hearing about studies years ago when they first started putting computers in classrooms - if you just put the computer in the classroom it was a distraction, but if you invested in appropriate software and built structured lessons around it it was a very capable tool.
With kids being expected to learn typing in elementary school these days, we did provide a computer (even in the bedroom!), but it was loaded with a locked down version of FreeBSD, and had no Internet/e-mail/etc access. Daily typing drills resulted in a fantastic improvement in typing (according to the technology teacher), and Tux Math, a math drill game, seems to be more attractive than flash cards or printed math sheets, especially since getting a high score involves having to do the work more quickly, and our insistence on home row means that it's effectively also typing drill for the numbers row.
Perhaps the real problem here is that a computer is of limited usefulness, and that if it isn't thoughtfully and carefully deployed and monitored, then the benefits become more questionable. The tech teacher implied that we're very different than most families in that we've not provided Internet access or e-mail, but quite frankly that's going to be delayed for as long as possible precisely because we don't see a huge amount of value in Internet access for kids in elementary school, and "requirements" that homework be "e-mailed" in isn't going to change that.
There are significant negative aspects to uncontrolled access to computers and the Internet, ranging from benign time-wasting to dangerous predators. As a tech-aware parent, it's difficult to find suitable and relevant things to use the computer for, especially without Internet access, and so it comes as no shock to me that placing a computer into a random family's educational mix has limited effectiveness.
The artiicle is The Early Catastrophe
I grew up dirt poor. One of the places we lived in had a dirt floor and no insulation in Great Falls, Montana.
I got to eat meat year round because my father poached deer out of season.
I got to eat bread because my parents bought hogs feed at 5 cents/lb to grind to flour.
I got to eat vegetables because we would gleen the fields of industrial farms of low growing fruit/veggies after the harvester machines passed through.
My parents were to religiously conservative to teach me anything at home that didn't come from the bible.
When we got a computer, it opened up the world for me.
From that point on, I never learned anything in school until I started working on my second college degree.
This was because I had already learned it from exploring on my own by the time school had gotten around to teaching it.
My experience may be far from common, but it was invaluable for me that I had access to a computer.
At my daughter's (who is 10 years old) school they strongly recommend no Radio, TV or Computer until 12 years old, yes it's Waldorf. I am a technologist (Linux/Unix administrator), but I have found that my daughter's desire to draw or read or write rather than be on the computer or watching TV very gratifying. I hope they consider this kind of policy in public schools, IMHO t would help children have better relationships (friends, family...etc) and be happier.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
Congratulations, you're a self-motivated learner. Providing resources to such a person is generally an enabling thing, regardless of what the resource is. The Internet can be a very powerful tool in such hands. However, many people just don't have that sort of drive, and will instead waste time on the Internet doing Facebook, instant messaging, games, and other not-particularly-educational things.
One might as well say girls hinder education for boys. Or TV. Or radio. Or cars. Or outside. Or.... So a computer doesn't HELP their education, but there was no solid conclusive evidence that it hurt, either. Even Texas just stated that "there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork." A kid that isn't interested in school isn't going to raise his grades because he got a fancy new computer. Or TV. Or radio. Or girlfriend. Or car. Or.... Counter study: give a group of kids a fully updated set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and see how it effects their education. No need, the results are above.
Well, it would be that and even the quests could be at least a good reading exercise, if people actually read that stuff any more. But nowadays they just go wherever the little cube points them and then chances are they might not even know where they've been.
I still remember teaching someone to play WoW, and let's leave him unnamed for the moment for the sake of protecting the idi... err... innocent. It went well until he found Quest Helper. Ouch. Then came talks like:
Me: Ok, we'll get the egg first and then for the other quest we'll get the kobolds further south, they have much better drop rate.
Him: Wait, wait, the little cube says there's a kobold there that has it!
Me: Ah, screw those, the drop rate is homeopathic on those.
Him: No, you don't understand! The cube says it has it!
Me: How the heck would it know that? The drops aren't even generated until you kill them? It'll show you the nearest kobold in the area, regardless of drop rate.
Him: No, the little cube says that kobold has it!
Me: *sigh* Ok, let's prove it then.
*Skip a minute of whack-a-kobold, and obviously it didn't drop the quest item*
Me: Did that kobold drop it?
Him: No...
Me: Told ya. Let's go south, as I was saying. Those have better drop rates.
Him: Ok
*Walk 10 ft*
Him: Wait, wait, the little cube says there's another kobold over there and it has the item!
Me: Didn't we just go through this? The "little cube" as you call it, can't possibly know what it will drop.
Him: Well, it just knows. If I mouse over it, it says it's for that quest. You'll see.
Me: *sigh* Ok, go get him, tiger.
*More whack-a-kobold, no drop*
Me: Ok, NOW do you see that it doesn't know that?
Him: Must have been a glitch.
Me: Look, seriously, just follow me, we could have gotten it already from the group down south. Just trust me, ok?
Him: Ok.
*Move another 10 ft*
Him: Wait, wait, the cube says the first kobold just respawned and it has the item!
Me: Not again...
Him: You'll see! If it says kill that one, then that one has it!
Me: Jesus Haploid Christ... Ok, let's prove it again, shall we?
Repeat about a dozen times, after which it dawned upon me that no amount of reasoning or failed tests would shake his religious faith in "the little cube" knowing everything, and just let him lead wherever the cube may point him. Better to spend another hour chasing a 1% drop rate than spend another hour making an enemy.
But, either way, if you asked him afterwards where he's been for that quest or what road to follow there, he'd be as clueless as a baby. He just followed the little cube. Any names, landmarks, etc, didn't even register and really didn't need to register. There was no need to notice stuff like sub-zone name or notice even where the road is or anything. Those were not what told him where to go. The only thing that mattered, the alpha and omega, was just where the little cube was on the minimap.
And just so I don't pick on just WoW, the same thing has been done for EQ2 too, in the form of maps with all quest positions already marked. And if anyone did a game based on RL geography, well, the same would happen. You'd get people who _still_ don't know where Oregon is, even after following the trail to it and back for a quest, because they weren't even noticing where they are or where they're going. The were just following the little cube.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, guns do make it easier to keep people alive. Some variant of the phrase, 'DROP YOUR WEAPON! DO IT NOW!' is usually involved.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Most of the studies I've seen about the impact of NEW technology on kids and education measure OLD skills and come up with statements about what is LOST. "Math skills" is a good example. How many of you were not allowed to use calculators in math class? Raise your hands. I remember when they were thought to imperil "math skills." A few educators saw them as game-changers and recognized that they enabled students even as they called for the development of new skills -- or a shift in the importance of various components of the skill set. It's very hard to see the real impact of new technology just because it's new. The things kids are learning from computers are things we have no words for - yet. I have confidence that there is learning going on, it's just not going to be learning that will enable business-as-usual to continue, so of course it's threatening.
Hey, I learned about global warming when I was in kindergarten, too. GOOOOOOOOO PLANET!
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Thank you for that inspiring story, Abraham LinkedIn.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes