A few weeks ago, a parent in Texas asked me how much my children were using screens to do schoolwork in the classroom. She wasn't talking about her personal device. (My child's school prohibits the use of smartwatches and smartphones during class, which I'm very happy about, but I can't argue with allowing the use of these devices in the classroom.) ) No, this parent was talking about screens in school. It is approved, as is the iPad and her Chromebook, which are individually issued to children for educational activities.
Embarrassingly, I couldn't answer her question. Because I never heard her question and she never even thought to ask. In part, the era of Covid-19 has made screen use an instant necessity, as one edtech executive told my colleague Natasha Singer in 2021. As previously mentioned, the pandemic has “accelerated the adoption of technology in education by well over five to 10 years.” At the beginning of COVID-19, when my older daughter started using her Chromebook to do her 2nd grade and her 3rd grade work, I just realized that my daughter had a great teacher and needed to know. I was almost relieved that he seemed to be learning things. By the time she was in fifth grade and the world was back to near normal, I knew she was bringing her laptop to school for in-class assignments; I never asked for details about how the device was being used. I trusted her teacher and her school implicitly.
Educational technology is often discussed as an equity issue in New York State, and for good reason. At home, disadvantaged children may not have access to personal devices or high-speed internet to complete digital assignments. But in a learn-to-code society where computer skills are seen as a meal ticket and humanities as a ticket to the unemployment line, there doesn't seem to be much talk about whether or not it's a ticket to the unemployment line. Beyond classrooms that specifically focus on technology, there are many screens in children's daily educational environments. We rarely heard details about what these screens were doing to children's literacy, math, science, and history skills.
And screens are really everywhere. For example, according to 2022 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fewer eighth-graders in public schools said their math teachers “never or rarely” used computers or digital devices to teach math. Only about 8 percent and 37 percent of math teachers say they have never or rarely used it. used this technology half or more than half of the time, and 44% said their math teachers always use this technology.
A surprisingly thorough review of education research found that, as is often the case with rapid change, “the speed with which new technologies and intervention models come to market has far outstripped the ability of policy researchers to continue to evaluate them.” Technology by Maya Escueta, Andre Joshua Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos, and Vincent Quan, published in The Journal of Economic Literature, 2020.
Despite the relative lack of research, particularly on the use of technology in the classroom, Escueta and coauthors suggest that “reporting the results of studies that follow one of two research designs; We have compiled a comprehensive list of all publicly available research on technology-based educational interventions. , randomized controlled trial or regression discontinuity design. ”
They found that increasing access to devices does not necessarily lead to better academic outcomes. In some cases, the amount of time children spent on their devices playing games simply increased. They wrote: “We found that simply providing students with access to technology produces widely mixed results. At the K-12 level, much experimental evidence suggests that giving computers to children has limited effects on learning outcomes. “This study suggests that it may have a negative impact, but generally improves computer proficiency and other cognitive outcomes.”
Some of the most promising research is in computer-assisted learning, which researchers define as “computer programs and other software applications designed to improve academic performance.” They cited a 2016 randomized study of 2,850 seventh-grade math students in Maine that used an online homework tool. The study's authors found that “the program improved the math performance of treated students by 0.18 standard deviations. On average, treated students spent less time using the program,” Escueta and coauthors said. This effect is especially noteworthy considering that it was less than 10 minutes per night and 3 to 4 minutes per week.
They also explained that in the classroom, computer programs could help teachers meet the needs of students at different levels. “When faced with the wide range of student abilities, teachers often teach a core curriculum and then adjust their instruction to fit somewhere in between,” she said. ” They found that good programs give individual attention to even the youngest and oldest children, which can help them improve their skills. There are computer programs for reading comprehension that have shown similar positive results in studies. Anecdote: My oldest daughter uses the app to practice her Spanish skills, and she handwrites Spanish vocabulary words on index cards. This combination seems to be working well for her.
Their review was published in 2020, but before the data from our grand distance learning experiment was published, Escueta and his co-authors argued that fully online distance learning would be different from hybrid or in-person schools. I discovered that it doesn't work very well. I called Professor Thomas Dee at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and he said, The social aspects to learning that we ignore at our peril. And I think technology can often take that away. ”
Still, Dee summed up the whole edtech topic for me this way: I think something really positive can come out of technology. But those are “meaningful supports at the periphery, not fundamental changes in the way people learn,” he said.
I would like to add that technology implementation is also very important. Any educational tool can be great or terrible depending on how you use it.
I'm not a technology evangelist or a Luddite. (That said, I haven't yet touched on the potential impact of teaching in the classroom with artificial intelligence, a technology that has the potential to be highly disruptive in other contexts.) is the most effective educational experience for all children.
We want to hear from you, our readers, because the data is so laggy and the information we have lacks granularity. If you are a teacher or parent of a current K-12 student, you want to know how learning is done. You and they both use technology, both good and bad. Please let us know by filling out the survey below. We may contact you to discuss further details.
