23 Jul 09 A spanner in Rudd’s digital education revolution?

The Sydney Morning Herald recently released this article entitled: “Rudd’s laptops send standards backwards”

THE centrepiece of the Federal Government’s so-called education revolution may be worse than useless, a visiting American researcher says.  Jacob Vigdor, of Duke University, North Carolina, has conducted what is probably the world’s biggest study on the effect on maths and reading scores of gaining a home computer. He finds “statistically significant” evidence that it sends them backwards.

“Children in homes with computers tend to do better than those in homes without – there’s no doubt about that…”
Peter Martin, July 20, 2009  http://ow.ly/hEsX

Perhaps negativity such as this is to be expected amid the turmoil of the most comprehensive and fundamental changes to education in living memory. Certainly those Luddites resisting these changes will enthusiastically point to such research with loud ‘ah hahs!’, thinking yes, we knew it all along, and we won’t be dragged into the 21st century kicking and screaming or otherwise.

The main finding of Professor Vigdor’s research seems to be that children with computers at home did better at school than children without computers. This can be explained by socio economic factors, the family’s educational background etc. However, after examining the performance of students before and after their home gained a computer he found they had “significantly worse” results in English and Maths.

Thus, we are expected to believe what is obviously a revoltionary form of getting information and connecting with the world (yes, I mean computers and the internet) is actually detrimental to children’s learning.  Oh good, I’ll just go back to my chalkboard and my dog eared text books from 1958 and pretend that all this technology hype never happened.  Forget it, that just isn’t going to happen.

What Professor Vigdor’s research fails to mention is how the before/after computing students used the technology.  I am very prepared to believe that a kid who is given a new piece of whiz bang technology with little guidance is very likely to ignore their studies.  Are they going to tirelessly search the web for the latest innovations in online education or play games and send meaningless messages on facebook and bebo?

The true implication of this research is that teachers and parents have a huge responsibility in how kids use technology.  Technology can of course be used as an incredibly powerful learning tool.  Remember when you had to trawl libraries to find research materials for essays, which half the time were lost or on loan and still get to the bank before 4pm or face a weekend without cash?  There is perhaps a tendancy to take the impact of technology on every aspect of our lives for granted.

Such technology can also be the ultimate time waster.  If the focus of the research had been the effects of how computers were used rather than in general a more accurate picture is likely to have emerged.

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Tags: digital education revoltion, education, Kevin Rudd, North Carolina, Research, student laptops, Sydney Morning Herald