Wednesday, December 08, 2004
A challenge to all educators and computer minded people out there
In honor of the 4 month prequel anniversary of my anticipated life as a father.
Study: PCs make kids dumber
Here is the jist. I want to know what everyone thinks about this, I think I agree with this.
I edited the text for brevity
“Students who use computers frequently at school perform worse than their peers at math and reading, a study claims.
Those using computers several times a week performed "sizably and statistically significantly worse" than those who used them less often.
The OECD pointed to a positive link between students' interest in computers and their literacy, and Fuchs and Woessmann found that the more computers there were in students' homes, the better their test performance.
However, they realized that more computers in a household generally means a more affluent family. Children from affluent homes tend to perform better academically, so Fuchs and Woessmann factored this in their analysis.
Having done this they found that the more computers there were in a student's home, the worse the student's math performance.
Fuchs and Woessmann found that students performed worse in schools with a significant lack of computers. However, they then took into account that schools with better computer availability also have better resources in general. They found that computer ability was not related to student performance.
They also studied the effects of computer use on test scores, and found that greater use of computers in the home impacted positively on test scores.
In schools the effect was different. Students who hardly ever used computers did a little worse than those who used them between a few times a year and several times a month. But those who used school computers several times a week performed "sizably and statistically significantly worse" in both math and reading.
The researchers suggest two theories to explain their findings. One is 'ability bias' - that it might be that teachers do not want lower-ability students to use computers.
The other theory proposed is that students who use computers frequently do so at the expense of traditional learning methods.”
I admit I am not in the education field (as it pertains to youth and adolescence)
I wonder if teachers use online / computer based education to lessen their burden on lecturing and verbal explanation more than to help the "kids"
is it easier to upload a Nova program explaining basic genetics (with downloadable power point slides printed up) than to actually teach the topic verbally and through textbooks. i am sure that students would want to watch TV rather than read and write notes.
My high school was behind everyone else technologically speaking but I graduated in 1995 and I handwrote every paper i did (because it was easier than sitting at a typewriter with whiteout) Now clearly that is a waste of time, especially with editing, and I would leave misspellings and other gramatical errors in my papers because i would rather do that than re-write the entire thing. THis is not a "it was harder and better when i was a kid you whipper-snapper"
I wonder (other than the utility and speed) the educational benefit of microsoft word automatically correcting misspellings, I really like spell check as an adult but I admit that until 2 years ago I thought business was spelled buisness (type it into Word, it automatically corrects it)
Also another question, to all english based people who read this.
How on earth do you stop plagarism? You can cut and paste anything into word, change the font blah blah blah and have a paper. Give me any topic in the world and I will have a 5 page double spaced report on it in 75 minutes. All fake.
It took much more time to plargarize a paper in high school because you had to type or write out the whole damn paragraph, You had better summarize and change it or you will be writing all day.
Is there a program like "educational based microsoft word" that does not allow cut and paste from the internet, would that work? or a google type page for educators to load a digital copy of students papers to scan the internet for similarities??
You could have kids submit a saved copy on disc/cd/email along with paper copy (do you still use paper copies?) upload them to a site that scans them in comparison to the web.
What do you think?
|
In honor of the 4 month prequel anniversary of my anticipated life as a father.
Study: PCs make kids dumber
Here is the jist. I want to know what everyone thinks about this, I think I agree with this.
I edited the text for brevity
“Students who use computers frequently at school perform worse than their peers at math and reading, a study claims.
Those using computers several times a week performed "sizably and statistically significantly worse" than those who used them less often.
The OECD pointed to a positive link between students' interest in computers and their literacy, and Fuchs and Woessmann found that the more computers there were in students' homes, the better their test performance.
However, they realized that more computers in a household generally means a more affluent family. Children from affluent homes tend to perform better academically, so Fuchs and Woessmann factored this in their analysis.
Having done this they found that the more computers there were in a student's home, the worse the student's math performance.
Fuchs and Woessmann found that students performed worse in schools with a significant lack of computers. However, they then took into account that schools with better computer availability also have better resources in general. They found that computer ability was not related to student performance.
They also studied the effects of computer use on test scores, and found that greater use of computers in the home impacted positively on test scores.
In schools the effect was different. Students who hardly ever used computers did a little worse than those who used them between a few times a year and several times a month. But those who used school computers several times a week performed "sizably and statistically significantly worse" in both math and reading.
The researchers suggest two theories to explain their findings. One is 'ability bias' - that it might be that teachers do not want lower-ability students to use computers.
The other theory proposed is that students who use computers frequently do so at the expense of traditional learning methods.”
I admit I am not in the education field (as it pertains to youth and adolescence)
I wonder if teachers use online / computer based education to lessen their burden on lecturing and verbal explanation more than to help the "kids"
is it easier to upload a Nova program explaining basic genetics (with downloadable power point slides printed up) than to actually teach the topic verbally and through textbooks. i am sure that students would want to watch TV rather than read and write notes.
My high school was behind everyone else technologically speaking but I graduated in 1995 and I handwrote every paper i did (because it was easier than sitting at a typewriter with whiteout) Now clearly that is a waste of time, especially with editing, and I would leave misspellings and other gramatical errors in my papers because i would rather do that than re-write the entire thing. THis is not a "it was harder and better when i was a kid you whipper-snapper"
I wonder (other than the utility and speed) the educational benefit of microsoft word automatically correcting misspellings, I really like spell check as an adult but I admit that until 2 years ago I thought business was spelled buisness (type it into Word, it automatically corrects it)
Also another question, to all english based people who read this.
How on earth do you stop plagarism? You can cut and paste anything into word, change the font blah blah blah and have a paper. Give me any topic in the world and I will have a 5 page double spaced report on it in 75 minutes. All fake.
It took much more time to plargarize a paper in high school because you had to type or write out the whole damn paragraph, You had better summarize and change it or you will be writing all day.
Is there a program like "educational based microsoft word" that does not allow cut and paste from the internet, would that work? or a google type page for educators to load a digital copy of students papers to scan the internet for similarities??
You could have kids submit a saved copy on disc/cd/email along with paper copy (do you still use paper copies?) upload them to a site that scans them in comparison to the web.
What do you think?
|
