“What is the purpose of the technology? That’s the biggest thing we need to be thinking about when it comes to our students’ device use. I’m constantly telling my middle schoolers to close their Chromebooks. I have kids who’ve learned to break through the school’s firewall to play games,” said Westport teacher Faith Sweeney.
Sweeney is one of twenty educators reading and discussing The Digital Delusion in a CEA book club this fall. In the book, cognitive neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath argues that it’s not a coincidence that a recent decline in students’ test and IQ scores has coincided with educational technology’s explosion into a $400 billion industry.
“Over half of our children now use a computer at school for one to four hours each day, and a full quarter spend more than four hours on screens during a typical seven-hour school day,” he writes. “Unfortunately, studies suggest that less than half of this time is spent actually learning, with students off-task for up to 38 minutes of every hour when on classroom devices.”
Among the many studies that Cooney Horvath cites to demonstrate the harm that tech use can have on student learning are the following.
- An OECD international review found students who frequently use computers at school do much worse in most learning outcomes.
- A study of nearly 300,000 U.S. students concluded that even small daily amounts of digital device use in schools are negatively correlated to reading comprehension scores.
- Other analysis showed that investing in air conditioning for schools has more positive impact on learning than investing in laptops for every student.
Alternatives to educational technology
Many of the teachers taking part in the book club have already experimented with using less tech with their students, and reading the book is pushing them to explore additional ways to get their students off screens.
Coventry middle school teacher Debby Page said she recently had an excellent opportunity to see how student work can vary depending on whether they complete it online or on paper. She gave her students 10 minutes to work through some foreign language questions—one day asking them to complete the work on their Chromebooks, another on paper. When students completed the assignment online, seven or eight said they were finished before the allotted time, but after review Page found they’d written very little. When students did the assignment with paper and pencil, only a couple finished before the time was up, and students’ answers were more thorough. She hypothesizes that students were distracted when completing the assignment online.
Wolcott High School English teacher Debbie Nicol says that when used for the right purpose, tech can be an important tool for her students, but she finds that when students have computers in front of them every class period it detracts from learning. “Kids are easily distracted by their devices. They’re constantly switching tabs.”
Educators say that COVID forced a switch to online learning. After becoming accustomed to Google Classroom and posting all assignments online, that’s become the default for most secondary teachers.
“It’s easier to do everything in Google Classroom. It’s so much easier to do everything on a Chromebook,” Bolton High School English teacher Colin Dennis says. “I’ve deliberately forced myself to make my students write by hand. I also know that their work is clearly their own when they write everything by hand first.”
Cooney Horvath writes that educational technology is particularly out of place in the earliest grades. Many of the gamified programs found in kindergarten and first grade classrooms use points, badges, timers, and other similar features so that students are excited to use them. Unfortunately, Cooney Horvath says that those gamified elements interfere with students’ ability to learn the content the programs are supposed to teach.
“I think districts need to catch up on this research,” a kindergarten teacher said. “In my district we’re mandated to use Lexia [an online literacy program] with kindergartners. I’m learning from this book that it’s just not best practice to put kindergartners in front of a device. I’m really struggling with my district’s mandate.”
“I hear that from educators all the time,” says CEA Teacher Development Specialist Kate Field, who facilitated the book club. “You’re stuck and have very little autonomy to change it—even though you know the approach is harmful. It would be great if we as a group could identify a path forward.”
“One thing from the book that particularly resonated with me is that potential is not a plan,” Dennis said. “We’re told to implement all of these different programs because tech has such great potential, but we jump on programs that don’t have solid data proving their effectiveness.”
In conversations she’s had with policymakers CEA Secretary Gail Jorden says she’s told them that educators are generally on board with dialing back on screens in schools, but she’s emphasized that there will need to be resources to replace them. “We’re also going to need PD, because once you’ve lost the use of a muscle, you need to relearn how to use it,” Jorden says. Newer educators have only worked in an environment where screens are omnipresent.
As legislators express interest in addressing screens in schools, Field says that educators need a voice in the development and implementation of any policies. “Teachers need to mobilize and make sure their perspectives are clearly heard.”
