You may want to stop and reconsider whether you think a home computer will help your child with reading and math.
A new Duke University study says North Carolina middle school students' test scores dropped after they got home computers, suggesting they spent more time playing "The Sims" than working practice math problems.
Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/06/19/540968/study-pcs-hurt-middler-grades.html
Really? They're playing The Sims? That would not have been my first guess.
This line was also interesting:
The study by Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy challenges the accepted wisdom that children who don't have computers at home are at a disadvantage compared with their wired classmates.
5 comments:
It is almost as if downloading porn doesn't help one's math scores ...
-Mark Roulo
My, what a lazy study. How about using 'time spent on school work' as a more theoretically relevant explanatory variable?
What might contribute to time *not* spent on schoolwork?
Doesn't matter -- the point is, it's not the computer, it's what the kids are doing instead of schoolwork. You could do exactly the same study with a video game system, or a television, or anything else. The fundamental problem is that of the parent not requiring the appropriate amount of study time . . .
This doesn't surprise me one bit. In the past few years I have been alarmed at how lacking in curiosity many students are. They expect everything to be on Wikipedia. We are teaching them to rely on tools rather than how to use their wits. As my mother, who taught in the 1950's, observed, "there's not one thing an elementary school computer program is doing that I didn't do with flash cards for far less."
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