Educational hope vs teenage reality

Economists are trying to measure a home computer's educational impact on school-children in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found.

Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, investigated educational outcomes after low-income families in Romania received government vouchers to help them buy computers.

"We found a negative effect on academic achievement," he said. "I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren't surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children."

The study found "strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian."

The principal positive effect on the students was improved computer skills.

At that time, most Romanian households were not yet connected to the Internet. But few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for - daily - was playing games. In the United States, Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd, professors of public policy at Duke University reported similar findings after studying the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina and its effect on school test scores over five years. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.

The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was largely confined to lower-income households, in which parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment.

The state of Texas recently completed a four-year experiment in "technology immersion." The project spent $20 million in federal money on laptops distributed to 21 schools whose students were permitted to take the machines home.

The one area where the students from lower-income families in the immersion program closed the gap with higher- income students was the same one identified in the Romanian study: computer skills.

Source: China Daily(By Randall Stross)