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After 15 Years, Maine's Laptops-in-Schools Initiative Fails To Raise Test Scores (npr.org)
For years Maine has been offering laptops to high school students -- but is it doing more harm than good? An anonymous reader writes:
One high school student says "We hardly ever use paper," while another student "says he couldn't imagine social studies class without his laptop and Internet connection. 'I don't think I could do it, honestly... I don't want to look at a newspaper. I don't even know where to get a newspaper!'" But then the reporter visits a political science teacher who "learned what a lot of teachers, researchers and policymakers in Maine have come to realize over the past 15 years: You can't just put a computer in a kid's hand and expect it to change learning."
"Research has shown that 'one-to-one' programs, meaning one student one computer, implemented the right way, increase student learning in subjects like writing, math and science. Those results have prompted other states, like Utah and Nevada, to look at implementing their own one-to-one programs in recent years. Yet, after a decade and a half, and at a cost of about $12 million annually (around one percent of the state's education budget), Maine has yet to see any measurable increases on statewide standardized test scores."
The article notes that Maine de-emphasized teacher training which could've produced better results. One education policy researcher "says this has created a new kind of divide in Maine. Students in larger schools, with more resources, have learned how to use their laptops in more creative ways. But in Maine's higher poverty and more rural schools, many students are still just using programs like PowerPoint and Microsoft Word."
"Research has shown that 'one-to-one' programs, meaning one student one computer, implemented the right way, increase student learning in subjects like writing, math and science. Those results have prompted other states, like Utah and Nevada, to look at implementing their own one-to-one programs in recent years. Yet, after a decade and a half, and at a cost of about $12 million annually (around one percent of the state's education budget), Maine has yet to see any measurable increases on statewide standardized test scores."
The article notes that Maine de-emphasized teacher training which could've produced better results. One education policy researcher "says this has created a new kind of divide in Maine. Students in larger schools, with more resources, have learned how to use their laptops in more creative ways. But in Maine's higher poverty and more rural schools, many students are still just using programs like PowerPoint and Microsoft Word."
I was in high school in the 1980s and they wanted to put Commodore PETs everywhere, then they wanted Apples, then the provincial government decided it would be IBM PCs in the computer classes. Looking back, I can imagine that the salesmen were salivating at all that juicy education money.
TI still sells overpriced calculators to universities today! Education is as much a racket as anything else these days.
Mostly random stuff.
Maybe the problem isn't with the knowledge these kids have, or their methods of acquiring knowledge (because yes, technology helps tremendously in this regard)... but perhaps the testing system is entirely fucked?
You mean just giving computers to kids doesn't make them smarter? You actually still have to teach them and get them engaged in learning?
Well I'll be...
Studies seem to show that attentive listening and HAND-WRITTEN notes have the highest retention overall in every category. I wonder why.
Imagine that you give a TV to a teenager. This TV has 100 channels. Two of those channels are educational. 98 channels are sex, drugs, rock n roll. What is your teenager going to watch?
There is so much distraction with internet access that only a very disciplined person can make sensible choices all the time. I don't have the answer. Perhaps it involves parenting.
...omphaloskepsis often...
That's really all there is to it. If you have good parents that get their kids ready for school at an early age, and keep them pressured/motivated to continue to work hard, they'll be fine. Shitty parents and a shitty home life, it is difficult to overcome that.
Around here they're doing iPads, not laptops. The yearly repair budget alone is killing most of the schools.
So the summary says there's been no measurable increase in test scores... okay.
But the summary also asks "is it doing more harm than good?" without, as far as I can tell, providing any data that addresses that question, one way or the other. So why is that question even there?
Are we supposed to imagine how it might be harmful? Has Maine perchance seen a spike in laptop-enabled crime, where bullies are using their government-provided laptops as bludgeons?
#DeleteChrome
You have a kid quoted who sounds like he is very much being prepared for the real world, another part that claims laptops could be doing harm, yet another part that says there is no measurable gain - with the implication there's no loss either.
So what if it does not raise test scores if the kids are actually LEARNING MORE.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This "Add tech to make kids smart" crap is brutally annoying. I have seen this since I was in school decades ago. There are certain things that schools are very very bad at teaching. One of the main reasons they suck at teaching things like languages and technology is that they focus on teaching things that can then be tested.
With spoken languages it is way easier to test for verb conjugation than the ability to exchange ideas with another person in the language in question. The same goes with technology. Technology is a tool, not an end goal. I used 3D modeling programs to make a 3D printed thing that solves a problem. I might be able to solve the same thing with glue, wax, duct tape, etc.
The problem that I would suggest that computers could help with is crappy teachers. Going with best of breed lectures or some other replacement for where many teachers suck would be a good start. That is probably the last thing they would use computers for. Or using computers for self guided learning, but nope that would be too scary for unions and very hard to test. So they probably used them for totally bureaucratic things that, at best, solved problems the administrators were having such as matching up kids IDs with their standardized tests. If you want to see the kids who excel from their school experiences with technology look at the kids who do things like build solar cars, or whatever fairly open ended technology problem they are let loose on. Those are the kids who go on to MIT; not the kids who memorized the 8 attributes of an Object Oriented Programming language or memorized the difference between functional and procedural programming without actually doing a single interesting program.
Is it doing more harm than good? It's sucking up all the money that could be better spent. And always: Fuck Apple!
I remember a very young kid's program on the BCC Acorn computer that asked you to draw and colour a house for a girl on the screen. You could chose the colours for the door and the windows by putting in numbers. So a child of mine started putting in the numbers. Then we wondered, if they specified numbers from one to seven, what happened when you put in eight, what happened at sixteen, what happened with minus one, what happened with two and a half? To our delight we got flashing colours, we got some of the original colours, and we could guess at the rules within the program.
Education is different for everyone. Sometimes it works best when your are not blindly following the rules, but asking why they exist, and what happens when you don't; preferably in some non-fatal environment. Something like Windows (this just got autocorrected to Sindows - really!, but I am on an Apple, which is morally no better) everything is supposed to work provided you obey the rules. On Linux installs, you get the same drag and drop interface, but sometimes the tool you want doesn't work well on your installation. You have to fish about for an alternative. Or you can find out what you can do by going on the web. You meet others who have met the same problem. It ends up being a scavenger hunt. You may even find out how to fix it yourself, and post your solution. Hell, you can even teach yourself some programming.
This is not an alternative to learning how to format your Windows documents correctly. The finder and fixer skills you get in keeping your machine running as you want it to run, will probably mean working out how to do CSS is less of a pain in the pancreas.
Rapid change is upon us. In the past a good school record implied one would have a decent life. That is no longer true. These days there are less job opportunities for jobs that do not involve a lot of misery. College has also gone over the top in expense and incurring debts large enough to get a degree may be a seriously bad idea. We have already seen a large number of people dropping out of the workforce. I wonder if we are not also seeing young people sort of dropping out of education even though they may still go to school. Quite a few people now make a living in such a way that the system scarcely knows that they exist. There are plenty of people who drive about picking up scrap metal that is listed on Craigs for free. We also have people who pick up wood pallets and firewood and sell what they haul. There are even people making a living with metal detectors and even people that create gold jewelry in their homes, all without any paper trail at all. I wonder how many people earn a living simply selling small amounts of pot. Perhaps one third of US wages are in an underground that remains occult and is rarely detected. Electronic money could change all of that.
At least not conceptually: you improve the curriculum and the teachers, and then student performance rises. That's what the evidence shows: better instructors using better curricula get better results. That should be pretty intuitive, but better than that it's what the data tells us.
So why don't more places try improving teaching and curricula?
I think it's because people don't want schools to be very different from what they experienced, even when (or *especially* when) they have nothing but contempt for the schools they went to. So instead they tinker with superficial quick fixes. Many of these, like increased student testing, or computer in the classroom, would have value in a school that is already on the right track. In a school that is not making progress betting in a big way on computers alone is like putting a giant wing on your Honda Civic to make it go faster.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You introduced pens, some pupils will be writing with them, some will poke the eyes of other pupils. You introduced books, some will read, some will draw penises in them. You introduced iPads: some will be browsing Wikipedia and Pubmed and some will be playing Angry Hippos.
The only way to shift the balance between these two activities: productive and chaotic is enforcement. Enforcement with something that works:
Corporal punishment.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Stop seeing male teachers as potential child molesters.
And start seeing them as potential child abusers, beating them with canes?
Oh, I see you left another comment in this vein right at the same time, you're just trolling. Seems the education system failed you, if you can't imagine a better hobby. They must have beaten you too many times, it affected your imagination.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's really scary is that we're willing to risk a whole generation of students with an experimental method of teaching. It's hard to get that back once it's lost.
We should teach the basics (reading, writing, and math) first. Then, maybe, just maybe, introduce technology a little bit at a time.
Yet, after a decade and a half, and at a cost of about $12 million annually (around one percent of the state's education budget), Maine has yet to see any measurable increases on statewide standardized test scores.
So what you're saying is we've managed to move children from paper to using laptops, which will actually prepare them for the future as adults, without any negative impact to learning? Sounds like a massive success to me.
But government — unlike those greedy KKKorporations — just could not possibly have made such a mistake! Unaffected by profit and other ulterior motives, benevolent and omniscient government officials know better than their naive and easily-excitable subjects ever could.
A corporation making a boondoggle investment like this would've replaced the CEO and, possibly, even gone bankrupt — who wants that? But the government officials responsible for the wasted million$ are all safely employed and/or receiving their well-earned pensions. Per-pupil costs have quadrupled since 1960ies — while the education-quality remained the same (or worsened, depending on who you ask).
Be it a school or a hospital, is not it much nicer, when the government is running something?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The education system must have been working pretty well in late 1800's and early 1900s. It managed to give us things like the industrial revolution, ubiquitous power, large scale agriculture, space exploration, medical advancements, etc...
So if the education system back then was able to provide us with the people that delivered all those kinds of outcomes... why are we trying to re-invent it completely?
Follow the money. Those who benefit financially from the re-inventions are the ones advocating for them. Back then, there weren't multi-billion dollar industries in chalk, paper, and slide rules, and a whole industry created to try and determine the efficacy of them.
I can't speak for Maine but I work in K-12 in the midwest. The goal is very simply to hire as few teachers as possible at as low pay as possible.
They've given a small carrot and a lot of sticks to getting rid of the older higher paid (and experienced teachers). They've completely gutted teacher's unions with legislation the only thing they're good for at all anymore is suing and even that is questionable.
They're using things like Edgenuity which is supposed to be used primarily for remediation in place of real classes with teacher's aids (aka babysitters) instead of people who can actually answer kid questions. There are other programs in the same vein which came before.
Most of the time the illegal practice of having a non-licensed teacher "teach" a class is to put a licensed teacher as the "teacher of record" while never having that person actually set foot in a class room.
I've literally seen sales people tell teachers with 30 years experience how they should be teaching their class because kid failures are automatically assumed to be solely the teacher's fault and the state assigned "partner" is just there to make all the money they can before skipping town.
Kids can literally copy and paste questions in to Google verbatim and get answers. There are phone apps that you can take a picture of a math question and be given the answer. Kids can and will cheat - especially the ones who don't want to be there which is the overwhelming majority. Many don't even care enough to do that anymore and will just put their heads down on their desks and wait for the day to be over. I'm not exaggerating.
We have more tablets/laptops/lab machines than students and they're not a panacea. You know what the higher performing public schools have over the ones that don't? Interested parents and a culture that supports them vs parents who are worse than their kids to deal with.
It's a race to the bottom and there are a lot of factors. Greed and corruption both inside and outside the education realm are up there.
Here is the discussion we had in 2000 about this matter. Some things change, others remain the same...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Seriously, I'm asking, why did anyone expect laptops to have a positive impact on test scores? Unless of course that laptop has internet access and may be used during tests, since 99% of our tests are geared towards regurgitating something, so the answer can easily be googled. But for learning?
Take a look at how those laptops are being used by the kids and, more importantly, how they are integrated into the class by the teachers: Not at all. How would they? You expect teachers who have exactly ZERO clue about computers, who probably know LESS about those machines than the students they're teaching, to show kids how to use computers to learn more efficiently? The teachers themselves could not use them, let alone teach how to use them.
That's the core of the problem, and unless you solve this bit you will not see any kind of benefit from handing machines to students.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is exactly that teaches don't know how to use the machines sensibly and hence they become a tack-on while they try to teach with the same old material they used to stuff into students half a century ago. The solution is not to pull students back to pen and paper but to teach teachers how to use current equipment.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most teachers are unable to get a degree in the subjects they teach. That should tell you something about the quality of our education system.
The average public school teacher is an overpaid daycare worker at best. Time for something different.
I often feel people believe computers are magic learning devices. They're not. They're useful tools, but tools need to be utilised effectively. And you need the right tool for the job. Sometimes that tool is a computer. Sometimes not.
In today's schools? Be glad that there is no corporal punishment when you're a teacher, I wouldn't be so certain to be not on the receiving end.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Who said that the goal of using them was to raise test scores? Why is that even a meaningful metric?
The benefit of putting laptops in schools is that kids learn how to use laptops. They learn about the networks and the internet, they learn how to use a mouse and how to type, they learn about digital data, they learn responsible use of those laptops. They have fun. They see how the world really works.
No matter what the result, if a headline has the word "test scores" in it everyone will go insane. If the scores didn't go up, it means schools aren't working. If the scores did go up, it's because they are teaching the test. Test scores measure certain things well, and other things not at all. In this case, you might as well say that introducing laptops failed to change the price of milk. It would be just as relevant.
Technology will not magically make a poor teacher better. The reality is that technology only supplements learning in the classroom. There still needs to be competent, professional teachers that are paid a realistic living and treated as such.
Dear lord, Maine 'invested' $12M x 15 years, or $180M, in something that had no appreciable impact on student test scores?!?!
Telling me it is just 1% of their education budget has me wondering what in the world Maine is getting for their $1.2BN 'investment' in public education.
Maine has a voucher program that puts 15-20% of the state's children in private schools - did they get laptops as well? Probably not...
Interesting how this voucher program, open to all children in the state, has been going since 1973, but the left (which vehemently opposes school vouchers) never seems able to shutdown this program.
Ken
isn't that you picked the wrong one-size-fits-all solution...
was the goal to raise grades? It may have been the stated intention but by coincidence they make it easier for teachers to handle assignments and generally cut the teaching workload outside of the classroom so that eventually they can cut teachers. Have they also been used as in-school child minding. Really, between adding distractions and creating filler periods with creative names like "extended learning time" they have watered down the actual human teaching time enormously.
Nullius in verba
Just throwing devices at the problem doesn't help anyone.
Technology has to be integrated properly into the curriculum very carefully and used in very specific ways to have a benefit on learning.
My child's school was super hot to trot on equipping kids in their grade school with iPads.. and it seemed to me like no one stopped to ask.. why? How will it help? In what ways?
I'm all for using it as a program to make sure that all children have access and experience with computers and the Internet etc.. it levels the playing field on that somewhat.. but as a learning tool.. I have never seen one of these initiatives make much difference.
Computers are a tool, one which damn near every employer expects proficiency.
Expecting a computer to raise test scores is like expecting wrenches to make a competent mechanic.
What's scary is that our educators expected computers to actually raise test scores....somehow....by magic.
Isn't that the sole purpose of the teaching profession?
I did a college level research paper on technology use in the classroom a couple years ago. Every source I found concluded technology expenditures did not improve core subject learning. The only benefit was exposure to equipment students would later need in the workforce, but that often came at the expense of measured progress on standardized tests. The surprising conclusion I came to was this isn't just an American thing. According to the UN, underdeveloped nations don't see the expected gains by putting laptops in the hands of their students. Some even do worse because the computers become a distraction. Essentially, they quickly learn to look up cat videos on the internet.
Every initiative I've seen to impose a particular type of device on school kids has been an unmitigated disaster.
The happy ending is that many of these schools have now gone platform agnostic and provide Chromebooks or refurbished Linux laptops and allowing BYOD. So long as they have a working browser and a screen bigger than 8 inches they don't care what you bring.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife