An
article in the UK's Daily Telegraph recently caused a flurry in ICT
circles. Reporting on a research study undertaken in Germany, the
article claimed that computer use doesn't boost student learning. It
stated that the analysis revealed no link between computer use in
schools and a student's learning of basic skills, such as maths or
reading. In fact,the researchers found that the more access students
had to computers at home, the lower they scored on tests, in part
because the devices distracted them from their homework. This would
have been dramatic enough, but coming as it did on the heels of an
announcement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer that more money was to
be made available to schools for computer equipment, the effect was
quite dramatic: forums not just in the UK but also in the USA were
buzzing with this bombshell.
But what did the study really say?
The
first point to note is that the the study was published back in
November -- 5 months previously. For some reason*, it took 5 months for
the story to appear in the press. Perhaps that isn't of monumental
importance in itself, except possibly as a warning to not always
believe everything you read as far as academic research is concerned.
Newspapers' function is to summarise the news, and perhaps to
sensationalise it. There is nothing sensational in an announcement
about something which happened almmost half a year ago, while
summarising academic research is fraught with problems, because there
are often so many caveats. This paper is no exception.
Here,
then, is a bullet point summary of what it found. As you'll see, it's
not as clear cut as the newspapers would have you believe! All I've
done here is to summarise the main findings. You'll need to look at the
paper itself (see the end of this article) for the methodology,
analysis and possible explanations of the findings.
- Evidence
on the relationship between computers and students' educational
achievement is misleading, because computer availability and other
characteristcs tend to go hand in hand. This applies both at home and
school.
- Simply
having computers at home seems to distract students from learning, but
using computers in constructive ways partly compensates for this
negative effect.
- Students
who never use computers or the internet at school show lower
performance than students who sometimes use computers or the internet
at school. But students who use them several times a week perform even
lower. The authors of the study suggest reasons for this: again, the
"correct" explanation is not immediately obvious.
- Computer
availability at school is not related to student performance in
maths and reading, whilst at home computer availability shows a strong
statistically significant negative effect. Note that this is after
taking into account the fact that better computer resources usually
means that other resources are better as well.
- Students
with internet access at home do better in maths and reading than those
without internet access at home. Additionally, the more students use
email and the internet, the better their performance in maths and
reading.
- Finally,
students that have educational software at home perform statistically
significantly better in maths, but there is no real effect on reading.
The original paper referred to in the article can be downloaded from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=619101
* The mystery has now been solved! Lucy Crighton, of LTScotland, has emailed me to say:
Dear Terry,
Thanks for this article
I
just wanted to add that the reason this was in the news now was that
the authors gave a presentation at the annual conference of Royal
Economic Society in Nottingham on 23rd March http://www.res.org.uk/society/annualconf.asp
Lucy is the NGfL information officer for Learning and Teaching Scotland. For great resources, visit: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/
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