A few weeks ago, a parent who lives in Texas asked me how much my kids were using screens to do homework in their classrooms. He wasn’t talking about personal devices. (Smartwatches and smartphones are banned from my kids’ schools during the school day, which I’m very happy about. I find any argument for allowing these devices in the classroom to be risky.) No, this parent was talking for school-sanctioned monitors such as iPads and Chromebooks issued to children individually for educational activities.
I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t answer her question because I had never asked or even thought to ask. Partly because the age of Covid-19 made screens imperative in an instant—as one ed-tech executive told my colleague Natasha Singer in 2021, the pandemic “accelerated the adoption of technology in education by five to 10 years.” In the early Covid years, when my oldest daughter started using a Chromebook to do homework for second and third grade, I was mostly relieved that she had great teachers and seemed to be learning what she needed to know. When she was in fifth grade and the world had returned to normal, I knew she took her laptop to school for in-class work, but I never asked for details on how to use the devices. I trusted her teachers and her school implicitly.
In New York State, ed tech is often discussed as an equity problem — with good reason: At home, underprivileged kids may lack access to personal devices and high-speed internet that would allow them to complete digital tasks. But in our learn-to-code society, in which computer skills are seen as a meal ticket and the humanities as a ticket to the unemployment line, there seems to be less chatter about whether they also many screens in our children’s daily educational environment beyond classrooms specifically focused on technology. I rarely hear details about what these screens add to our children’s literacy, math, science or history skills.
And screens really are everywhere. For example, according to 2022 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about 8% of public school eighth graders said their math teachers “never or almost never” used computers or digital devices to teach math , 37 percent said their math teachers used this technology half or more than half of the time, and 44 percent said their math teachers used this technology all or most of the time.
As is often the case with rapid change, “the speed at which new technologies and intervention models reach the market has far outstripped the ability of policy researchers to keep up with their evaluation,” according to a dazzling in-depth review of research on the education. technology by Maya Escueta, Andre Joshua Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos and Vincent Quan published in The Journal of Economic Literature in 2020.
Despite the relative lack of research, particularly on the use of technology in the classroom, Escueta and her co-authors compiled “a comprehensive list of all publicly available studies on technology-based educational interventions that report findings from studies after two research designs, randomized controlled trials or discontinuity regression designs.”
They found that increasing access to devices did not always lead to positive academic outcomes. In some cases, it simply increased the amount of time kids spent on devices playing games. They wrote, “We’ve found that simply giving students access to technology yields largely mixed results. At the K-12 level, much of the experimental evidence suggests that giving a child a computer may have limited effects on learning outcomes, but generally improves computer proficiency and other cognitive outcomes.”
Some of the most promising research is around computer-assisted learning, which the researchers defined as “computer programs and other software applications designed to improve academic skills.” They reported a 2016 randomized study of 2,850 seventh-grade math students in Maine who used an online homework tool. The authors of this study “found that the program improved math scores for the treated students by 0.18 standard deviations. This impact is particularly notable given that treatment students used the program, on average, for less than 10 minutes per night, three to four nights per week,” according to Escueta and her colleagues.
They also explained that in the classroom, computer programs may help teachers meet the needs of students at different levels, as “when faced with a wide range of student abilities, teachers often end up teaching the core curriculum and to adjust instruction in the middle of the class.” A good program, they found, could help provide individual attention and skill development for children at the bottom and at the top, too. There are computer programs for reading comprehension that have shown similar positive results in research.Anecdotes: My oldest daughter practices her Spanish skills using an app and handwrites Spanish vocabulary words on index cards.The combination seems to work well for her.
Although their review was published in 2020, before the data for our large distance learning experiment was published, Escueta and her colleagues found that fully online distance learning did not work as well as hybrid or in-person schooling. I called Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, who said that in light of previous studies “and what we understand about the long-term effects of the pandemic on learning, it highlights to me that there is a social dimension to learning that we ignore at our peril . And I think technology can often take that away.”
However, Dee summed up the whole technology thing for me this way: “I don’t want to be black and white about it. I think there are really positive things from technology.” However, he said these are “substantial supports at the fringes, not fundamental changes in the way people learn”.
I would add that the application of any technology is also of great importance. any educational tool can be great or terrible depending on how it is used.
I am neither a technology evangelist nor a Luddite. (Though I haven’t even touched on the potential implications of teaching in the classroom with artificial intelligence, a technology that, in other contexts, has so much destructive potential.) What I want is the most effective educational experience for all children.
Because there is such a lag in data and a lack of sensitivity to the information we have, I want to hear from my readers: If you are a teacher or parent of a current K-12 student, I want to know how you and they are using technology — the good and the bad. Please fill out the questionnaire below and let me know. I can contact you for further discussion.
