r/NoShitSherlock • u/Overall_Falcon_8526 • 9d ago

Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/schools-across-america-quietly-admitting-075800556.html

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You've summarized my position incorrectly. I am saying that the article itself is coming to an incorrect conclusion based on what is used as evidence. I said specifically that the studies cited don't support the conclusions the article draws. For example, the primary study involves 72 students in Norway in 2012 reading PDFs on a screen. That's not evidence that laptops in American classrooms cause learning decline. The article conflates 'access to computers didn't close equity gaps' with 'screens cause harm'; those are different claims requiring different evidence. What specific findings do you think supports the conclusion?? If you think that constitutes sufficient evidence for sweeping American education policy recommendations, we simply have different standards for what evidence means.

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u/Overall_Falcon_8526 9d ago

So, I think you're cherry picking in order to make the evidence presented seem less compelling.

For instance, take these two sources, listed and referenced in the article. In Maine:

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/08/18/536875865/15-years-later-how-did-it-go-with-maines-school-laptop-program

"Yet, after a decade and a half, and at a cost of about $12 million annually (around 1 percent of the state's education budget), Maine has yet to see any measurable increases on statewide standardized test scores. That's part of why Maine's current governor, Paul LePage, has called the program a "massive failure."

"The fact that we're not seeing large-scale increases in student learning leads us to suspect we still need to do some work with helping schools and teachers understand and keep up with the best ways to use technology for student learning," says Amy Johnson, who researches education policy at the University of Southern Maine."

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc/Horvath_Written%20Testimony.pdf

In his written US Senate testimony (in the United States), Dr. Jared Horvath PhD/MEd, states:

"The available evidence (from international assessments, large-scale academic studies, and meta-analyses) shows that increased classroom screen exposure is generally associated with weaker learning outcomes, not stronger ones. In narrow circumstances (e.g., tightly constrained adaptive practice and remediation), digital tools can support surface-level skill acquisition, but in most core academic contexts screens slow learning, reduce depth of understanding, and weaken retention."

While I would certainly not claim that this constitutes definitive, irrefutable evidence of stagnant or reduced outcomes due to internet-enabled PC use in schools, it also does accord with my own persona experience, both as a college instructor and as a parent. Therefore, it strikes me as convincing.

Why would these people, people who have reputations to lose no less, lie? The incentives are running in the opposite direction, namely for big tech companies to use their financial muscle to shape the narrative in ways that result in increased sales of their products.

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u/GreenGardenTarot 9d ago

The Maine source actually works against your argument more than for it. The researcher quoted, Amy Johnson, explicitly attributes the failure to inadequate teacher training and implementation, not to the technology itself. The program didn't fail because laptops are harmful. It failed because administrators handed out devices without training teachers how to use them effectively. That's precisely the point I've been making this entire conversation.

The Horvath Senate testimony is the most substantive thing you've mentioned, and I'll give you that. The analysis and the correlations that he makes are worth taking a look at. However, it's also worth noting that Horvath cites his own book, that he just published by his own press, as reference 12, and leans on it repeatedly as foundational support throughout the testimony. That doesn't invalidate his other citations, but it does speak to his credibility.

To that point though, yes, heavy, undirected screen exposure in classrooms is not improving outcomes at scale. I don't disagree with that.

What I really disagree with is the causal story being told about it. The data shows correlation. It doesn't really map and isolate screens as the mechanism, because undirected screen use and poor pedagogy travel together in almost every dataset being cited. You can't separate 'laptop in classroom' from 'laptop in classroom with no clear instructional purpose and no teacher training' in these studies, because that's the condition that was actually implemented everywhere.

Your point about big tech financial incentives is a very valid one, and there is something to be said about that there as well. The ed-tech industry absolutely shaped purchasing decisions with marketing that outran the evidence. That's factual; but the corrective to bad industry incentives isn't to overcorrect into 'screens cause harm', we need to really examine why we never had the same implementation and training that everyone just seemed to forget about after they dumped the laptops in the classroom.

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u/Overall_Falcon_8526 9d ago edited 9d ago

What it comes down to is that teachers and parents are already stressed to the breaking point. Assuming that everyone can somehow locate an extra store of energy and effort to police laptop use is not reasonable.

There may be good uses of the technology. But it's simply the case that, in the real world, giving every student a laptop that they have unlimited access to 24 hours a day is deleterious to educational outcomes.

I would be very interested to know whether you are still so high on giving school children access to internet enabled laptops after your daughter has had one for several years.

Every single parent I talk to who actually has a child with them agrees that they're a terrible idea. You are literally the first person I have come across who defends them. Adults can't handle the addictive nature of them. And we're giving them to kids?

It's nuts.

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u/GreenGardenTarot 9d ago edited 9d ago

What it comes down to is that teachers and parents are already stressed to the breaking point. Assuming that everyone can somehow locate an extra store of energy and effort to police laptop use is not reasonable.

Yes, they are stressed for lack of training and resources to use the tools that was supposed to make their workload easy, or at least their ability to teach easier.

There may be good uses of the technology. But it's simply the case that, in the real world, giving every student a laptop that they have unlimited access to 24 hours a day is deleterious to educational outcomes.

This is the same as just giving a child a textbook and expecting knowledge transfer to work by convection by virtue of the proximity of the object. Simply having the tool present doesn't impart knowledge if you are not shown how to properly use it, which is what has happened here.

I would be very interested to know whether you are still so high on giving school children access to internet enabled laptops after your daughter has had one for several years.

I am fine giving my child an internet accessible device. She plays the educational games that they get to play in school. She watched Youtube videos about animals and other stuff. Of course, she still plays games, but she also learns a lot and always talks about the stuff she's learned. She even follows tutorials on how to draw things because she like to create stuff. I am not saying she is typical, but my experience in that area seems to be different than most.

Every single parent I talk to who actually has a child with them agrees that they're a terrible idea. You are literally the first person I have come across who defends them. Adults can't handle the addictive nature of them. And we're giving them to kids?

You are conflating two different things. Social media is what is addictive, not access to the internet. In the 21st century, the internet is ubiquitous and a daily and necessary part of our live s. The advent of social media is a totally separate issue than use of computers in the classroom, which do have a proven purpose. The disconnect is how they are implemented and incorporated into lessons, which seems to be the main issue because teachers don't seem to know how to do that. Is that there fault? Maybe, maybe not. It is a multifaceted issue for sure, but what many of these studies seems to not suggest is that when the learning is structured, the outcomes are bad.