It’s time to admit we don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to educational technology.
We’ve already had one round of chagrined admissions. About 10 years ago, the common practice was buying hardware and dropping it into schools: Every student got a laptop, perhaps, or every classroom got a computer-driven whiteboard. Policymakers finally realized that such purchases don’t boost student achievement or create a new generation of programmers.
Better planning is now more common, but it’s time for chagrined admission 2.0.
The problem is that tech purchasing decisions are usually not much better informed than your decision about whether or not to buy a smartwatch. History shows that perfectly sensible intuitions about how devices ought to work in classrooms often prove wrong.
Consider Amazon’s recent $30 million contract to sell e-books to New York City schools over a three-year period.
Reading on a screen would seem to be little different than reading on paper. Maybe even better: They can integrate video and audio, for example, and content can be updated easily. But in study after study, reading comprehension is actually a little worse on screens. That’s why even younger readers with lots of screen-based experience say they prefer paper.
Or consider the common notion that the Internet has changed what should be taught in school. As Marissa Mayer (at the time a Google executive) opined in 2010, “The Internet has relegated memorization of rote facts to mental exercise or enjoyment.”
In principle, you can look anything up, but in practice, we don’t, because it takes effort. In some studies, readers were ready to quit a text if they didn’t know at least 98% of the words.
Then too, searching online often provides irrelevant information. Suppose I read the headline “Mercedes executives worried about trade war” and I search for “Mercedes.” My top hits will be about dealerships, mechanics and reliability. The brain can beat Google for filtering irrelevant information, but the right information must be in your head.
Finally, there’s handwriting. We now communicate almost exclusively through keystrokes. Why spend a year learning a skill useful only for signing checks?
Wrong again. It’s long been known that better handwriting is associated with better grades, and not just because studious kids write neatly. Recent research has clarified it’s not handwriting per se, but fine motor skills — the ability to integrate visual information and small muscle movements — that’s associated with strong learning.
The moral of this story is increasingly clear. Our intuition, and even our common sense, tricks us when deciding whether a new gadget will help kids learn.
At the same time, we can’t insist schools fossilize traditional practices out of fear that change might make things worse. Moving forward calls for different strategies, depending on whether a new technology changes how we deliver instruction or whether it changes the content itself.
Electronic textbooks or computer-driven whiteboards are just new delivery methods, and researchers can evaluate those quickly. But careful, planned assessment (and the courage to admit something isn’t working) is still a rarity.
It’s of much greater concern when we contemplate changing what students will learn, based on our sense of how technology is changing the world. The consequences of deemphasizing facts or eliminating handwriting instruction can’t be known for years.
A solution might be to adopt new technologies alongside traditional methods; in time, researchers can evaluate whether both are needed. That’s how calculators were integrated into math classrooms.
Above all, let’s remember: Technology may change quickly. Our brains don’t.
Willingham, a psychology professor at the Univesity of Virginia, is author of “Raising Kids Who Read.”
