Slashdot is running a story about a highly questionable research study:
The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today…. Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University.
While the report itself doesn’t seem to be available, I’m going to make a wild guess here: these tests were administered using #2 pencils and sheets of paper with many bubbles on them, which students diligently filled out.
Does no one else see the problem here? I would like to see the Telegraph article retitiled, “Students Who Are Tested in a Context Differing Significantly from their Instructional Environment Do Worse.” Why would we be shocked or surprised to find that kids who spend more time with paper and pencil outperform their high tech peers on paper and pencil tests??? If the tests had been administered on computers, which group would have been the top performer? As Paul Saffo famously said, “It’s the context, stupid.”
Yet another example of people with an agenda “doing research.” What an embarassment. No wonder educational research is completely discredited in the popular mind.
You have an agenda, and not the authors.
http://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_1321.html
‘We estimate the relationship between students’ educational achievement and the availability and use of computers at home and at school in the international student-level PISA database. Bivariate analyses show a positive correlation between student achievement and the availability of computers both at home and at schools. However, once we control extensively for family background and school characteristics, the relationship gets negative for home computers and insignificant for school computers. Thus, the mere availability of computers at home seems to distract students from effective learning. But measures of computer use for education and communication at home show a positive conditional relationship with student achievement. The conditional relationship between student achievement and computer and internet use at school has an inverted U-shape, which may reflect either ability bias combined with negative effects of computerized instruction or a low optimal level of computerized instruction.’
A simple Google search would find the study…