Home Computers Equal Lower Test Scores 278
An anonymous reader writes "Politicians and education activists have long sought to eliminate the 'digital divide' by guaranteeing universal access to home computers, and in some cases to high-speed Internet service. But a Duke University study finds these efforts would actually widen the achievement gap in math and reading scores. Students in grades five through eight, particularly those from disadvantaged families, tend to post lower scores once these technologies arrive in their homes."
Ender's game (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the problem.
A child, that is not supervised to do anything that even closely resembles some sort of work on a computer will spend it on whatever this child finds to be the most interesting thing.
There will be many slashdotters here, who will say: "but I grew up with a computer in the house, maybe with more than one computer, and I learned on it."
These people are correct. It is possible to learn with a computer. However their circumstances, like my own, were limited to a small number of things that we could do. I didn't have access to a real computer until about 12, but I was interested in them by reading about them and learning how to do things with them on paper. I made programs and my first programs were some games, I made them on paper and later was able to transfer those into a real machine.
The kids who grew up into /. readers are in their very late twenties to their very late thirties, these had computers in the house in eighties - nineties, we had computers that ran much simpler operating systems and there was not such a clear abundance of actually very user friendly and easy stuff to do, except for pretty good 2D games actually. These kids were obviously from a bit more affluent backgrounds, many saw their parents use computers for work, but this is not necessary.
So these kids, who became interested in the machines, found the most interesting thing to do with their computers was to try and create stuff, to produce things with computer. Sure they plaid games with them, but they also tried writing their own games. They wrote tools, text editors, calculators, drawing programs, they built stuff with computers, added their own extension boards, it was interesting, it was something that could be shown off to the peers, at least to those who cared, so this was also a way to achieve some status among peers.
If at the time the computers were what they are today: very powerful tools with very advanced user interfaces that provided tens of thousands if not millions of different ways to work with the machines plus the ability to socialize in hundreds of ways on line, ability to download music/movies/games within minutes or hours of appearance of new titles, ability to interface with computers through phones and have it all synchronize, if at that time the games looked like they were built by multi-million dollar Hollywood studios, it would have created the perception (maybe partially correct perception) that one person's ability to try and manipulate these complex networked nodes with 3D graphics engines was no longer accessible to a kid.
The operating systems of today go beyond simple DOS so much, that a kid could not do much with those directly because it takes a million of human lives to learn them.
Beside that, there are calculators, wikipedia, sites that offer to do your homework, p2p, where answers can be probably found and downloaded and shared further, there is facebook/myspace/whatever, there are all these tools that can do work for you and there is no TIME for anything between all of the tweets and twats on line. Though we did have chatrooms, BBSs and IRCs.
I think the Ender's game had an idea that made sense, I am sure it's not the only book that had that idea of a network that is created on purpose for education only.
The kids, who have nobody to guide them about how to use the machines they are given for learning at least should be put into position where learning is what they are pushed to through the kind of a computer/network system that they would be allowed to use.
The computers for kids that are expected to learn something, should be different from the 'normal' today's machines, they should be simpler in terms of software/hardware interaction, at least there should be a way to switch between a full crazy modern OS and a simple OS for learning about how the computers work. The network should be designed for learning. There should be things to do in it that would not give out answers but that would pro
Re:Well, no shit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:from the article (Score:3, Informative)
You are from a TOTALLY DIFFERENT ERA and are NOT NORMAL. I don't mean that in a bad way, just that you cannot apply your experiences to the rest of the world back then, today, and certainly not children today either.
We had a very similar time growing up. I received my first computer at age 6. Although I did have games, the computer opened up a world to me that was, and is, beautiful. CSS and my experiences coding for different browsers has made me want to get a divorce, but I am sticking to it... for now.
I never did any homework either. Hated it. I saw it as pointless. Once I have demonstrated that I understand the material and can apply it to a task, what is the point of endless repetition? I did all my assigned homework for the year in a single weekend and practically *revolted* when their response was to assign more. Seriously, I just "lost my shit" in the teacher conference at 8 years old and walked out. I saw it as inefficient and if I had a choice between doing some homework or writing some neat recursive functions, or working with 100K worth of hardware I had access to, which way do you think I went? Yeah, I was making 3d animation back when it took an hour a FRAME. In fact, I am pretty sure my father broke child labor laws and that I saved him at least $100k in development costs alone one year. Ironic that you had to pull out my finger nails to wash some dishes, but if you wanted 3D Seismic videos generated all you had to do was throw me in a room with the equipment.
I expect there are many others like us with similar experiences growing up. So the computer had a vastly positive effect for me. Very little of my time was spent playing games, and most of it was spent using it ways that would be considered professional use.
However.......... I see that this does not hold true for the majority of kids today. The computer ceased to be a neat tool that you would tinker with, or "hack", and spend considerably hours learning skills and behaviors that would help you the rest of your life. It's now nothing more than an entertainment appliance to most people.
I have a brother going through this right now. He has zero interest in how a computer works, how it is programmed, etc. He watches what I can do and it might as well be magic to him. To him and his friends I am no different than some hacker in the movies who can slice through government networks in minutes and control satellites. All because I show them some neat stuff to monitor packets, networks, and some Linux shells doing what they do best.
For him it is a portal to the Internet, nothing more. Specifically, RuneScape, Facebook, Myspace, etc. It has reached the point where he pretty much banned from this use of any technology that involves a battery. He is not alone. Every one of his friends, and other kids at school, all have the same problem. The technology is simply not used and experienced the same way that we did at that age.
The affects are clearly deleterious. Overwhelmingly so. You have to remember, that 20 years ago you did have to have some skill to be able to operate a computer, or any form of advanced technology. Most kids were not using computers the way we were because they lacked the drive, or maybe the intelligence, to really operate it. You had to have a certain level of tenacity to operate a computer at that point in our history. Think about how easy a computer is today in just terms of the UI alone?
All the hard work is done for the kids today, and they get to just "use it". Well, kids are using it to goof off. They are not learning anything from their use of them either, with few exceptions. They're stil kids like us around, but just in the same proportions. I would think it is rare for the computers to be used as tools for word processing, homework etc, when you are just a few clicks away from YouTube, FuckSpace, WhatEverBook, etc.
I am not surprised at all by these findings. A computer is not something you can add to a kids life and it magically raises their g
Re:Well, no shit (Score:3, Informative)
fact [fakt] –noun
1.something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
Even their example sentence shows that belief has NO bearing on existence of fact.
and THATS a fact.
Re:The article is BS. (Score:3, Informative)
My parents couldn't teach my anything about computers.
They couldn't or they didn't? There is a difference. Though I knew it before then, it was reinforced for me in the Army that having to teach a subject could cause the person to learn it. When I was in I spent about 1/2 of my tyme in training and part of that training was that we had to train others. For instance my CO, Commanding Officer, sent me to train for NBC, Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical, decontamination. He sent me there so that when I came back I would train the others in the unit the same thing. There were other things we had to learn on our own before teaching others as well. Even though I didn't use them myself, using manuals I had to learn how to field strip, clean, and reassemble a .45 [wikipedia.org] (only those who fired morters [wikipedia.org], and I didn't, used them) and an M60 [wikipedia.org] so again I could teach others how to.
If I were a parent without experience or knowledge of computers, I'd try to learn it so I could teach my own children them too. The same with foreign languages. I knew some Chinese, French, and German and I am willing to take classes to relearn them so I can teach them to my own children. Actually my sister's daughter is learning Chinese and my sister wants me to work with my niece to help her learn Chinese.
Falcon
They couldn't. I knew more about computers than they did. I taught them about Windows95, and about the internet and they are still learning from me to this day.
And I also taught computer technology to low income parents in my community. I was the teacher.
The problem is that society is changing so quickly and the traps/danger/risks increasing or changing so rapidly, that the older generations simply have no concept of how the world works anymore. They don't understand the risks of Facebook so they cannot tell their teenage son or daughter to avoid using social networking sites. Sure the Obama's might know, but Obama is a law professor so he would be up in the law. The average parent is not a law professor, a lawyer, or a computer scientist, so the average working class parent has nothing they can tell their children about the risks, traps, pitfalls and mistakes that people are making.
This is why you always have kids making the same mistakes over and over. There is no one to warn them. If a certain activity was made illegal just yesterday, only the children whos parents are lawyers are going to know about this change. If your parent isn't a lawyer then you wont even know you broke the law that was just made yesterday. Kids don't even know their rights, and even if they know them they don't know the traps which can result in them losing their rights.
And adults aren't going out of their way to tell them either. All of this talk about test scores wont help. A kid who is not street smart or who has no common sense wont make it in this world regardless of whether they got all As in class or had sparkling test scores. The real test is outside of the classroom and thats where you see good kids doing really dumb things like drinking themselves to death, or drinking and driving, or just getting arrested on drug charges, or other stupid situations which they could have avoided.
The first thing a child has to learn is how to use the internet to keep up with the change. It's really that simple. Going on slashdot to see how technology is changing. Going to the legal blogs to see how the law and law enforcement processes are changing. Analyzing their environment using the internet, seeing patterns and forming conclusions.
This is not something that a test score can test for.A test score cannot teach a child to judge character. A test score cannot determine if a child knows how to use tools in general to better themselves and this includes computers.
All tools have to be us