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The Economist print edition, Oct 24th 2002
FIRST it was the movie, then the radio receiver, and then the television. Each was once seen as magical technology that would transform children's education. Now it is the computer. Politicians everywhere promote computers as a way to replace the boring old blackboard and sometimes a few boring old teachers too, by improving their productivity. The arrival of the Internet has stepped up the pace. Billions of dollars have gone to clutter classrooms with terminals and keyboards. Companies (including Pearson, part-owners of The Economist) wax lyrical on the potential of educational software. And a mountain of studies demonstrates the impact of these wondrous machines in school.
Except that they don't. Hardly any studies compare classes of children taught with and without the help of computers—and none randomly allocates children into differently taught groups, as a medical trial would do. So the billions have been spent on a hunch. Some thought that installing computers was a good way to teach children to use the things, and thus fit them for the 21st century. In fact, as every parent knows, the average ten-year-old understands far more about computers (and indeed the Internet) than the typical rocket-scientist. Many more thought that teachers would find computers useful tools for instruction in other subjects, such as maths or languages. But a new study, using evidence from Israel, now contrasts children whose teachers do and do not use computers in the classroom (see article). It strongly suggests that the hopes for computers are just as wrong as those for classroom movies, radio and television. Worse, it picks up signs that computers may even impede learning: fourth-graders taught maths with the help of computers appear to do worse than similar fourth-graders taught without them.
Could the explanation be technophobia on the part of either teachers or students? Unlikely, says Larry Cuban of Stanford University, who has studied computers and education for many years. Almost all teachers and pupils have at least one computer at home these days. Moreover, although teachers and children rarely use computers—or use them effectively—in the classroom, both groups use computers a great deal at home for schoolwork. And, indeed, this is hardly surprising. Classroom computers can be disruptive. They rarely enhance the studious atmosphere in which children are most likely to learn. The new conventional wisdom is that young children in particular learn best when they face the teacher. But computers encourage children to split into noisy little groups. And one of the vaunted advantages of computer-based learning, that it allows children to proceed at their own pace, has so far turned out to be wrong: educational software is much more one-size-fits-all than a good teacher, skilled at tailoring the lesson to the varied abilities of a class.
The billions that have financed computers in classrooms have therefore been money not spent on textbooks or teachers. The Israeli study puts the cost of installing computers at about one teacher a year per school. Ironically, while the educational effectiveness of computers is doubtful, good evidence suggests two other ways to spend money on schools that yield clear benefits. One is to cut class size; the other, to improve teacher training. But then, what politician wants an old-fashioned answer like that?
The Economist print edition, Oct 24th 2002
BACK in 1922, Thomas Edison predicted that “the motion picture is destined to revolutionise our educational system and...in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.” Well, we all make mistakes. But at least Edison did not squander vast quantities of public money on installing cinema screens in schools around the country.
With computers, the story has been different. Many governments have packed them into schools, convinced that their presence would improve the pace and efficiency of learning. Large numbers of studies, some more academically respectable than others, have purported to show that computers help children to learn. Now, however, a study that compares classes with computers against similar classes without them casts doubt on that view.
In the current Economic Journal, Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victor Lavy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem look at a scheme which put computers into many of Israel's primary and middle schools in the mid-1990s. Dr Angrist and Dr Lavy compare the test scores for maths and Hebrew achieved by children in the fourth and eighth grades (ie, aged about nine and 13) in schools with and without computers. They also asked the classes' teachers how they used various teaching materials, such as Xeroxed worksheets and, of course, computer programs.
The researchers found that the Israeli scheme had much less effect on teaching methods in middle schools than in elementary schools. It also found no evidence that the use of computers improved children's test scores. In fact, it found the reverse. In the case of the maths scores of fourth-graders, there was a consistently negative relationship between computer use and test scores.
The authors offer three possible explanations of why this might be. First, the introduction of computers into classrooms might have gobbled up cash that would otherwise have paid for other aspects of education. But that is unlikely in this case since the money for the programme came from the national lottery, and the study found no significant change in teaching resources, methods or training in schools that acquired computers through the scheme.
A second possibility is that the transition to using computers in instruction takes time to have an effect. Maybe, say the authors, but the schools surveyed had been using the scheme's computers for a full school year. That was enough for the new computers to have had a large (and apparently malign) influence on fourth-grade maths scores. The third explanation is the simplest: that the use of computers in teaching is no better (and perhaps worse) than other teaching methods.
The bottom line, says Dr Angrist, is that “the costs are clear-cut and the benefits are murky.” The burden of proof now lies with the promoters of classroom computers. And the only reliable way to make their case is, surely, to conduct a proper study, with children randomly allocated to teachers who use computers and teachers who use other methods, including the cheapest of all: chalk and talk
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