Laptop Study
Henrico County soon will embark upon the most extensive study of a school-based laptop computer program ever undertaken in the United States.The county’s School Board last week unanimously approved the first phase of a two-and-a-half year study of its high school laptop program. Noted technology and education research expert and Columbia University professor emeritus Dr. Dale Mann of New York-based Interactive, Inc. will oversee the study, which will begin Feb. 1.
. . .
Mann said the focus of his study would be to determine not only whether the laptops help improve student test scores but also to gauge how effective they are at helping students learn. He also wants to determine how frequently teachers use the laptops during classroom instruction.“We want to know, Is this thing working? How is it working? And for whom is it working? And how do we know?” Mann said.
They still don’t get it. My guess is that the evidence will reveal that the laptops did not contribute to a significant improvement in learning. There will be qualitative data revealed to show that students were excited to have the laptops and that parents liked them as well. Many students will explain that they used the computers for extra-curricular activities (e.g., chatting with friends). Teachers will even say that the laptops were a good idea and that they integrated the laptops into their teaching. Attendance might be up (and, that is a good thing), but test scores are not going to move much, if at all. Teachers will receive training to help learn how to integrate technology, so they may actually use the technology more in their teaching, but the fact that we put more effort into helping the teachers use the technology could be time we could have spent to provide other professional development to those teachers . . . so, some improvements could just be the result of the extra effort we put into working with teachers; not the laptops themselves, eh?
However, the question not being asked is whether or not we value teaching our students how to become literate with regard to technology and with regard to the massive amount of information on the Internet. Every state has a No Child Left Behind test. Not one of these tests assesses these literacy skills, but I would argue that being able to navigate information online and find relevant and unbiased information are skills that are increasingly becoming as important as many of the skills that NCLB testing measures, particularly for life behind the k-12 experience. If we aren’t testing skills on the NCLB tests, then we aren’t going to spend time teaching those skills; however, these laptops initiatives will undoubtedly force schools to cover this material as part of the ubiquitious computing learning experience. These kids will benefit from having had this experience, but the evaluation in this study doesn’t appear to have the resources in place to reach this conclusion. That’s a shame.