Studying PCs in Classrooms -- 10 Years Too Late

It’s been more than 10 years since President Bill Clinton described the 21st Century classroom as a place in which “computers are as much a part of the classroom as blackboards." Since then, schools -- and parents -- have spent millions of dollars on computers for students and their children under the assumption that the computers are directly related to improved learning and higher test scores. The problem is that no national study has proven those claims.

Now, more than a decade after the fact, the federal government wants to find out what the link is and has awarded a grant to education researchers at Indiana University to study how teachers and students use computers to learn. This seems a bit late.

For sure, the study could shed light on just what value computers give students in the classroom. But this fact has been debated for years. As Todd Oppenheimer pointed out in his article (subscription required) that appeared in the July 1997 issue of The Atlantic, computers’ value to education is questionable. An excerpt from the article:

… Alan Lesgold, a professor of psychology and the associate director of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, calls the computer an "amplifier," because it encourages both enlightened study practices and thoughtless ones. There's a real risk, though, that the thoughtless practices will dominate, slowly dumbing down huge numbers of tomorrow's adults. As Sherry Turkle, a professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a longtime observer of children's use of computers, told me, "The possibilities of using this thing poorly so outweigh the chance of using it well, it makes people like us, who are fundamentally optimistic about computers, very reticent."

Oppenheimer compares the computers-in-the-classroom phenomenon to film-strip technology students used 40 years ago: “‘Computers in classrooms are the filmstrips of the 1990s,’ Clifford Stoll, the author of Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (1995), told The New York Times last year, recalling his own school days in the 1960s. ‘We loved them because we didn't have to think for an hour, teachers loved them because they didn't have to teach, and parents loved them because it showed their schools were high-tech. But no learning happened.’”

There's no reason to believe that these arguments are outdated -- especially given the fact the federal government just issued a grant to find out if they are. Besides, the rush to introduce computers in the classroom before researching whether they would, indeed, increase performance is part of a long string of similar information technology investments that organizations of all kinds have made, an act of chasing the hottest technology under the assumption that technology, in and of itself, will allow us to work faster and be smarter. “It’s technology, after all," goes the argument. "It must provide value."

For years, IT managers in federal agencies and in the Office of Management and Budget have tried to head off such thinking before it gets too far down the IT investment road. OMB's requirement for agencies to write business cases are just one example of this. A technology may seem like it would create efficiencies and add value, but the results from an IT investment are typically hard to measure â€" if an organization ever measures them at all. Or, which is more likely, the added value many times falls far short of the expectations managers had when the technology idea was first dreamed up.

The computers-in-the-classroom policy seems to have followed this same line of reasoning, although, at first, some research showed computers raised achievement. Years ago supporters pointed to the study “Connecting K-12 Schools to the Information Superhighway,” conducted by McKinsey & Co. for a Clinton task force formed to study technology and education, as the reasons why the federal government should support a policy that made computers a big part of curriculums. It concluded:

Many schools have experienced significant improvements in student performance after introducing computer-assisted instruction. For example, the Carrollton City School District in Georgia established a computer lab, among other changes, to reduce the failure rate in 9th grade algebra from 38% to 3%. In New Jersey, the Christopher Columbus Middle School saw student performance rise from well below to above state averages on standardized tests in reading, language arts, and math after the school implemented reforms that included extensive use of networked computers. The academic literature confirms technology's role in these improvements: a review of 254 controlled studies concluded that appropriate use of computers in the classroom reduces the time needed to master certain types of knowledge by as much as 30%. Put another way, in three school years, students benefiting from computer-assisted instruction can learn almost a full year's worth of material more than students who do not have access to the technology.

But Oppenheimer, in his article, refutes many of these findings.

Back to today. Now Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy will try “to figure out how teachers use technology in lessons and how students learn from that technology,” according to the Indianapolis Star article. “There have been some larger efforts, but it's mostly been a study here, a study there,” Jonathan Plucker, director of the center, told the Star. “It's a critical question that has never been answered. That's just so exciting.”

It might have been a good thing to ask that "critical question" more than a decade ago before schools and parents spent billions of dollars on computers without knowing for sure if they do indeed raise student achievement or how the computers could be used to do so.

The study is due to be completed in April 2009.