The ETS results were anticipated a year earlier in another report, the
ECAR Study of Students and Information Technology, 2005: Convenience, Control, and Learning.
ECAR reports come out every year (the 2006 version was quoted earlier), and its sponsor, EDUCAUSE, is “a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology” (). EDUCAUSE researchers approached the project assuming that students want more technology in the classroom, possess strong information technology skills, and need little further training, and that their teachers need to bolster their own techno-knowledge to “appeal to the attention and learning styles of this generation of students.” To their surprise, the outcomes showed the opposite. “Ironically,” the Executive Summary ran, “we found that many of the students most skilled in the use of technology had mixed feelings about technology in their courses.” Furthermore, many students entering college lacked information-technology skills necessary to perform academic work, and the skills that they did have stemmed from school curricula, not from their leisure digital habits. As for the importance of learning, students ranked it fourth on the list of benefits provided by technology, behind convenience, connectedness, and course management.
The ETS and EDUCAUSE results, purveyed by organizations that favor technology in classrooms, belie the high-flying forecasts of digitally inspired dexterity and intelligence. Students can image and browse and post and play, but they can’t judge the materials they process, at least not in the intellectual or professional terms of college classes and the workplace. Irvin Katz, senior scientist at ETS, sharpens the discrepancy: “While college-age students can use technology, they don’t necessarily know what to do with the content the technology provides.” Fans of digital youth behaviors believe in a carry-over effect, that gaming, blogging, IM, and wikis yield cognitive habits and critical-thinking skills that make for an intelligent, informed citizen. The energetic forms of thought inspired by those practices produce more discerning minds, they say, and while the content of games and blogs slips into adolescent trivia, when young Americans do encounter serious content, they’ll possess the acumen to digest it. On the first large tests of the aptitude, however, they failed. It seems that the judgment of Web content involves mental faculties different from the faculties cultivated by standard Web consumptions by young Americans.
These surveys aren’t the only empirical data casting doubt on the technological savvy of young users. In the newly wired public school classroom we have a gigantic, heterogeneous laboratory of digital learning, and one of the most expensive experiments in education reform in our history. Ever since President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which included annual subsidies for schools to develop technology programs (funded through taxes on phone bills), school officials, technology providers, and excited politicians have conspired to carry screens into classrooms and integrate Web activities into curricula with suitable optimism and zeal. In 1995, the President’s Panel on Educational Technology recommended that at least 5 percent of all public K-12 educational spending go to technology, and in his 1996 State of the Union Address, President Clinton avowed, “In our schools, every classroom in America must be connected to the information superhighway, with computers and good software, and well-trained teachers.” Seven years later, in
The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved
(2003), education journalist Todd Oppenheimer summarizes the investment: “In the decade that ran from the early 1990s to the first years of the twenty-first century, technovangels in city after city have been creating new schools and restructuring old ones, spending approximately $70 billion on new programs that revolve around the computer.”
Each year a new digital initiative begins, with the promise of engaging wayward middle schoolers, updating textbooks, closing the “digital racial gap,” easing the teachers’ burden, and raising test scores. In his lengthy appraisal of the enterprise, Oppenheimer chronicles one pro-technology decision after another. A school district in Union City, California, spent $37 million to purchase new tools for 11 schools, and paid for it by cutting science equipment and field trips. Montgomery Blair High School in Maryland, one of the first schools to be wired (in 1989), enjoyed Internet service provided by the National Institutes of Health. The Kittridge Street Elementary School in Los Angeles dropped its music program in order to afford a “technology manager.” In 2001, Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia distributed Apple laptops to every high school student in the system, and a year later the State of Maine gave one to each seventh-and eighth-grade student in the state, along with their teachers. New Technology High School in Napa, California, received $300,000 from the U.S. Department of Education and $250,000 from the California Department of Education for its pioneering, super-wired facilities. (One of the school’s slogans is, a teacher tells Oppenheimer, “It doesn’t matter what you know. It matters what you show.”)
Overall, in 2006, public schools across the country purchased $1.9 billion of electronic curricular materials, a rise of 4.4 percent from 2005, and the momentum shows no signs of slowing. The fervor extends to powerful foundations and education firms, whose reform proposals always assign technology a critical role in public school improvement. A 2003 report by the National Commission on Writing,
The Neglected ‘R’: The Need for a Writing Revolution,
began with the observation that “the teaching and practice of writing are increasingly shortchanged throughout the school and college years.” It also noted that “today’s young people, raised at keyboards and eager to exchange messages with their friends, are comfortable with these new technologies and eager to use them.” So, we have a contradictory situation, poor writing in school and energetic writing at home online. Instead of pausing to consider a relationship between popular technologies and poor writing skills, though, the report careens in another direction. It advises that a National Educational Technology Trust “be explored, perhaps financed through federal-state -private partnerships, to pay for up to 90 percent of the costs associated with providing hardware, software, and training for every student and teacher in the nation.”
Reading Next: A Vision for Action and Research in Middle and High School Literacy,
a 2004 report sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, likewise cites the problems, for example, the low reading skills of high school dropouts and graduates. Nevertheless, its 15-point plan for improvement sets “A Technology Component” at number eight, asserting blankly that “technology is both a facilitator of literacy and a medium of literacy.” Nowhere does it consider how technology in the lives of adolescents promotes or retards the development of verbal skills—technology as actually used by them, not ideal visions of what technology might do best. Instead, the document invokes the standards of the times: “As a topic, technology is changing the reading and writing demands of modern society. Reading and writing in the fast-paced, networked world require new skills unimaginable a decade ago.” The overheated qualifier “unimaginable” reveals how firmly the education sector has adopted the revolutionary, epochal thinking of hi-tech activists.
Higher education, too, joins the trend. In 2004, Duke University passed out iPods to every freshman, and in 2005 Clemson required entering freshmen to purchase a laptop. The Clemson digital assistance Web site explains why:
We had a four year pilot laptop computer program which investigated the benefits of a laptop computer environment from both practical and pedagogical points of view. The results are clear—our laptop students are completely convinced this is the only way to go!
Taking the enthusiasm of 18-year-olds as a measure of educational benefits may sound like a dicey way to justify such a sweeping change in classroom practices, but many studies out to evaluate e-learning do precisely that. When the Maine laptop program mentioned on page 117 commissioned a midyear progress report, researchers affirmed that it “is having many positive impacts on teachers and their instruction, and on students’ engagement and learning.” The evidence, as cited in
eSchool News:
“By an overwhelming margin, seventh graders who received laptop computers last fall say the computers have made schoolwork more fun,” and “83 percent of the students said the laptops improve the quality of their work.” A 2002 report by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting titled
Connected to the Future
found that using the Internet has made Hispanic and African-American students “like school more,” and that “these positive attitudes from children and parents in under-served populations underscore the potentially vital role that the Internet can play in children’s education.”
Pro-technology forces play up the better attitudes as signs of progress, and who doesn’t want a happier school population? When we isolate actual learning, however, the self-reported happiness of the kids begins to make sense in an altogether opposite way. Digital technology might brighten the students’ outlook not only for the obvious reason that it gives them mouses and keyboards to wield, but also because it saves them the effort of acquiring knowledge and developing skills. When screens deliver words and numbers and images in fun sequence, digital fans assert, the students imbibe the embedded lessons with glee, but, in fact, while the medium may raise the glee of the students, we have little evidence that the embedded lessons take hold as sustained learning in students’ minds. For, in the last few years several studies and analyses have appeared showing little or no achievement gains once the schools went digital. Various digital initiatives have fallen short, quite simply, because students who were involved in them didn’t perform any better than students who weren’t.
• In 2000, Kirk Johnson of the Heritage Foundation analyzed NAEP data on students who used computers in the classroom at least once a week and on students who used them less than once a week. Controlling for the major demographic factors, as well as the qualifications of the teachers, Johnson created a statistical model and applied it to NAEP’s nationwide sample of fourth-and eighth-graders who took the reading test in 1998. His conclusion: “Students with at least weekly computer instruction by well-prepared teachers do not perform any better on the NAEP reading test than do students who have less or no computer instruction.” (Johnson)
• In 2004, two economists at the University of Munich analyzed data from the 2000 Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA), the achievement test for 15-year-olds discussed in chapter one. They compared test scores for students in 31 countries with background information collected on PISA questionnaires regarding home and school computer use. Their conclusion: “Once other features of student, family and school background are held constant, computer availability at home shows a strong statistically negative relationship to math and reading performance, and computer availability at school is unrelated to performance.” (Fuchs and Woessmann)
• In winter 2006, two University of Chicago economists published an appraisal of E-Rate, the federal program of subsidies to public schools for Internet access. E-Rate revenues started to reach schools in 1998, climbing to $2.1 billion by 2001, and the researchers wanted to find out if the program did, indeed, improve learning outcomes. Focusing on California, which administered regular achievement tests to students and maintained records on computers in classrooms, they determined that from 1997 to 2001, the portion of schools with Internet access in at least one classroom leaped from 55 percent to 85 percent. Some gain in student learning should have emerged. Yet, the authors conclude, “the additional investments in technology generated by E-RATE had no immediate impact on measured student outcomes.” Furthermore, more time online didn’t help: “When we look at the program’s impact after two years, the estimated effects go down, not up.” (Goolsbee and Guryan)
• As part of the Technology Immersion Pilot, in 2004 the Texas Education Agency directed $14 million in federal funds toward wireless technology in selected middle schools in the state. Teachers and students received laptops, teachers underwent professional development, and technical support was ongoing. The program included an evaluation component concentrated on student achievement. When the evaluation appeared in April 2006, it reported improvements in parental support, teacher productivity, and student behavior, but it said this about academic outcomes: “There were no statistically significant effects of immersion in the first year on either reading or mathematics achievement.” Furthermore, the “availability of laptops did not lead to significantly greater opportunities for students to experience intellectually challenging lessons or to do more challenging school work.” (Texas Center for Educational Research)
• In March 2004, the Inspectorate of Education in Scotland produced an evaluation of information and communications technology (ICT) in the public schools. Over the preceding five years, Scotland had invested £150 million to integrate computers into all areas of student work, and the report resounded with cheers for the aims and progress. “The potential to transform patterns and modes of learning and teaching is clear,” the chief inspector intoned, and dozens of assertions in the report back him up, such as “Use of ICT by learners encourages independence in learning” and “Learners use ICT well to develop their understanding of the world in which they live.” But several skeptical remarks keep popping up, almost as afterthoughts. “This did not often lead to enhanced learning in the subject area,” goes one, and another: “The burden placed on teachers by the need to monitor the content of learners’ personal pages on [networking] sites led some teaching staff to question the net value of these services but all learners found them valuable and enjoyable to use.” The most damning judgment comes at the end in a decisive summation: “Inspectors found no evidence of increased attainment, in formal qualifications or against nationally defined levels, that could be directly attributed to the use of ICT in learning and teaching.” (Scotland Inspectorate)
• In March 2007, the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance issued an evaluation report entitled
Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings from the First Student Cohort.
Mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, the report examined the use and effectiveness of selected technologies in different elementary and secondary school classrooms. Fully 132 schools participated in the study, and Mathematica Policy Research and SRI International conducted it. Vendors of the products trained teachers in their use, and researchers used control groups and conditions to meet scientific standards. Student achievement was measured mainly with test scores, and yielded an unambiguous first finding: “
Test Scores Were Not Significantly Higher in Classrooms Using Selected Reading and Mathematics Software Products
” (emphasis in original). Even though the research team chose 16 products out of a competitive review of 160 submissions, identifying them partly for evidence of effectiveness (12 of them had received or been nominated for awards), the products didn’t raise or lower student performance at all.
Education Week
drolly observed, “The findings may be disturbing to the companies that provided their software for the trial” (see Trotter). The conclusions are not decisive, as some of the control groups implemented other technologies in their work. But the fact that the most popular and respected technologies in reading and math education produced no significant differences calls into question the millions of dollars invested by the federal government.
• In May 2007, the
New York Times
reported a policy change in a New York State school district that was one of the first to outfit students with laptops. Responding to teacher feedback and learning outcomes, “the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty—and worse” (see Hu). The school board president explained, “After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement—none.” The story also cited other hi-tech failures. A Richmond, Virginia, high school “began eliminating its five-year-old laptop program last fall after concluding that students had failed to show any academic gains compared with those in schools without laptops,” and in 2005 Broward County, Florida, ended a $275 million program to provide laptops to 260,000 students after finding that the cost would exceed $7 million to lease the computers in only four schools.