Educational technology isn't leveling the playing field
The local name for the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington is "the Badlands," and with expert reason. Pockmarked with empty lots and burned-out row houses, the area has an unemployment rate of 29 percentage and a poverty rate of 90 percent. Merely a few miles to the northwest, the genteel neighborhood of Anecdote Loma seems to belong to a different universe. Here, educated professionals shop the boutiques forth Germantown Avenue and return abode to gracious rock and brick houses, the average price of which hovers above $400,000.
Within these very different communities, however, are two places remarkably similar in the resources they provide: the local public libraries. Each has been retooled with banks of new computers, the latest software and speedy Internet access. Susan B. Neuman, a professor of early childhood and literacy education at New York University, and Donna C. Celano, an assistant professor of communication at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, spent hundreds of hours in the Chestnut Hill and Badlands libraries, watching how patrons used the books and computers on offering.
The ii were especially interested in how the introduction of computers might "level the playing field" for the neighborhoods' immature people, children of "full-bodied affluence" and "full-bodied poverty." They undertook their observations in a hopeful frame of listen: "Given the wizardry of these machines and their power to support children's self-teaching," they wondered, "might nosotros begin to encounter a endmost of the opportunity gap?"
Many hours of observation and analysis later, Neuman and Celanano were forced to acknowledge a radically different event: "The very tool designed to level the playing field is, in fact, un-leveling it," they wrote in a 2012 book based on their Philadelphia library study. With the spread of educational engineering science, they predicted, "the not-so-small disparities in skills for children of affluence and children of poverty are about to get fifty-fifty larger."
Neuman and Celano are not the only researchers to achieve this surprising and distressing conclusion. While technology has frequently been hailed equally the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of prove indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: it is increasing the gap between rich and poor, betwixt whites and minorities, and between the school-prepare and the less-prepared.
This is not a story of the familiar "digital divide" — a lack of access to technology for poor and minority children. This has to do, rather, with a miracle Neuman and Celano observed again and again in the two libraries: granted access to technology, flush kids and poor kids use tech differently. They select dissimilar programs and features, engage in different types of mental activity, and come away with different kinds of knowledge and experience.
The un-leveling impact of technology too has to practise with a phenomenon known every bit the "Matthew Consequence": the tendency for early advantages to multiply over time. Sociologist Robert Merton coined the term in 1968, making reference to a line in the gospel of Matthew ("for whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall accept more abundance: simply whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath").
"The very tool designed to level the playing field is, in fact, un-leveling it." Susan B. Neuman and Donna C. Celano, researchers in children's use of engineering science.
In a paper published in 1986, psychologists Keith Due east. Stanovich and Anne E. Cunningham practical the Matthew Effect to reading. They showed that children who go off to a stiff early on start with reading acquire more than vocabulary words and more than background noesis, which in turn makes reading easier and more enjoyable, leading them to read still more than: a virtuous cycle of achievement. Children who struggle early on with reading fail to learn vocabulary and cognition, find reading even more difficult as a consequence, and consequently practice it less: a dispiriting downward screw.
At present researchers are beginning to certificate a digital Matthew Consequence, in which the already advantaged gain more from engineering than exercise the less fortunate. As with books and reading, the almost knowledgeable, virtually experienced, and nearly supported students are those best positioned to use computers to leap further ahead. For example: In Texas's Applied science Immersion Airplane pilot, a $20 1000000 project carried out at that place offset in 2003, laptops were randomly assigned to public centre schoolhouse students. The do good of owning one of these computers, researchers later determined, was significantly greater for those students whose test scores were high to begin with.
This may stem in part from the influence of adults on children's reckoner activities, every bit Susan Neuman and Donna Celano observed in the libraries they monitored. At the Anecdote Hill library, they establish, young visitors to the reckoner surface area were well-nigh always accompanied by a parent or grandparent. Adults positioned themselves close to the children and close to the screen, offering a stream of questions and suggestions. Kids were steered away from games and toward educational programs emphasizing messages, numbers and shapes. When the children became confused or frustrated, the grownups guided them to a solution.
The Badlands library boasted computers and software identical to Anecdote Colina's, just hither, children manipulated the computers on their own, while accompanying adults watched silently or remained in other areas of the library altogether. Defective the "scaffolding" provided by the Chestnut Loma parents, the Badlands kids clicked around frenetically, rarely staying with ane programme for long. Older children figured out how to use the programs as games; younger children became discouraged and banged on the keyboard or wandered away.
These dissimilar patterns of use had quantifiable effects on the children's learning, Neuman and Celano showed. Chestnut Loma preschoolers encountered twice as many written words on computer screens as did Badlands children; the more flush toddlers received 17 times as much developed attending while using the library's computers as did their less privileged counterparts. The researchers documented differences among older kids as well: Chestnut Hill "tweens," or 10- to 13-year-olds, spent five times as long reading advisory text on computers as did Badlands tweens, who tended to gravitate toward online games and entertainment. When Badlands tweens did seek out data on the web, it was related to their homework but ix percent of the fourth dimension, while 39 percent of the Chestnut Loma tweens' information searches were homework-related.
Enquiry is finding other differences in how economically disadvantaged children employ technology. Some bear witness suggests, for example, that schools in low-income neighborhoods are more apt to employ computers for drill and practice sessions than for creative or innovative projects. Poor children besides bring less knowledge to their encounters with computers. Crucially, the comparatively rich background knowledge possessed by high-income students is not only nigh engineering science itself, but about everything in the broad world beyond one's neighborhood. Not simply are affluent kids more than likely to know how to Google; they're more likely to know what to Google for.
Slogans like "one laptop per child" and "one-to-1 computing" evoke an appealingly egalitarian vision: If every child has a computer, every child is starting off on equal footing. But though the sameness of the hardware may feel satisfyingly fair, it is superficial. A computer in the easily of a disadvantaged kid is in an important sense non the same matter as a computer in the hands of a kid of privilege.
The focus of educators, politicians, and philanthropists on differences in admission to technology has obscured another problem: what some phone call "the 2d digital divide," or differences in the use of engineering. Access to adequate equipment and reliable high-speed connections remains a business, of course. But improving the way that technology is employed in learning is an even bigger and more than important event. Addressing information technology would require a focus on people: preparation teachers, librarians, parents and children themselves to employ computers effectively. It would crave a focus on practices: what ane researcher has called the dynamic "social envelope" that surrounds the hunks of plastic and silicon on our desks. And it would require a focus on cognition: groundwork knowledge that is both wide and deep. (The Common Core Standards, which practise not so much as mention technology, may exist pedagogy's most significant contribution to true computer literacy.)
It would take all this to begin to "level the playing field" for America's students—far more than a bank of computers in a library, or fifty-fifty one laptop per child.
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Source: https://hechingerreport.org/educational-technology-isnt-leveling-playing-field/
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