How beneficial are 'one-to-one' laptop programs in schools?
Drawing on 15 years of observations, two researchers find that test scores improved significantly and that students exhibited a variety of other skills when they used laptops.
It did not find any significant improvement in reading, math or science in countries that heavily invested in technology to improve student achievement. In fact, the report found that technology perhaps even widened the achievement gaps.
Does this mean we should abandon attempts to integrate technology in schools?
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We are researchers of technology and learning in K-12 environments, and our research suggests this would be shortsighted.
For the last 10 years, our research team has been investigating what are called “one-to-one” programs, where all the students in a classroom, grade, school or district are provided laptop computers for use throughout the school day, and often at home, in different school districts across the United States.
The largest one-to-one laptop program in the world is OLPC (One Laptop per Child), which mainly targets developing countries, with the mission “to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children.” In the United States, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) launched a one-to-one laptop initiative in fall 2002, which made Maine the first state to use technology to transform teaching and learning in classrooms statewide. Later, these programs were extended to other school districts as well.
In addition to our own extensive observations, we conducted a synthesis of the results of 96 published global studies on these programs in K-12 schools during 2001-2015. Among them, 10 rigorously designed studies, mostly from the U.S., were included, to examine the relationship between these programs and academic achievement. We found significant benefits.
We found students' test scores in science, writing, math and English How beneficial are 'one-to-one' laptop programs in schools? - CSMonitor.com: