COMPUTERS IN THE CLASSROOM MAY DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD
New Research Finds That Computers Are Most Effective As Teaching Tools When Used Sparingly, And To Teach Kids At Certain Ages Specific Subjects.
Initiatives to provide every schoolchild with a laptop or tablet computer have, to date, been well-publicized failures. And perhaps they were bad ideas to begin with.
Computers can certainly be effective tools for teaching children of certain ages specific subjects. But a large new study suggests their presence in the classroom is far from universally positive.
“Students worldwide appear to perform best on tests when they report a low-to-moderate use of school computers,” Helen Lee Bouygues, president of the Paris-based Reboot Foundation, argues in a just-released report.
“When students report having access to classroom computers and using these devices on an infrequent basis, they show better performance,” Bouygues writes. “But when students report using these devices every day, and for several hours during the school day, performance lowers dramatically.”
The Reboot Foundation is a non-profit devoted to “cultivating a capacity for critical thinking.” Its new report suggests that, while computers can sometimes help children grasp certain concepts, their overuse is highly worrisome.
Bouygues analyzed data from two sources: the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which provided math and reading scores for American CONTINUE READING: Computers In The Classroom May Do More Harm Than Good | PopularResistance.Org
