Schwab's Summary of Chapter Four

Chapter Four: Online Learning and Non-Learning (pgs 111-162)

The author starts this chapter by looking at the findings of the Educational Testing Service, the company that brings us the SAT. They had high school and college students take a survey on their “digital research skills” and found that although these students could play games and enjoy all of the social networks that are available, they cannot manage the digital information available. They called this missing ability, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) literacy. As Irvin Katz, a senior scientist at ETS explains, “While college-age students can use technology, they don’t necessarily know what to do with the content the technology provides.”
Mark Bauerlein continues, citing several more studies about how students can definitely use the digital tools, but “On the first large tests of the aptitude, however, they failed. It seems that the judgment of Web content involves mental faculties different from the faculties cultivated by standard Web consumptions by young Americans.” What are these “Web consumptions”? They are MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and all of the games that teens and young adults flock to.
These studies notwithstanding, public schools across the nation have put screens in more and more classrooms since 1996 when President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act that has funded technology programs by using taxes on our phone bills. I can remember when our school received computers in every classroom—we called them Janklow computers and they were installed by cheap labor from DOC inmates! The computers were too few to make a difference (five in a classroom of 25-30 students) but we had access and could rotate students if we watched the clock.
But, as the book continues, access to computers did not raise our students’ math and reading skills. The educational games they played on the computers were fun, but students showed “little to no achievement gains…..students who were involved in them (digital initiatives) didn’t perform any better than students who weren’t.” In fact, two researchers from the University of Munich that analyzed the 2000 Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA) [see chapter one for information about this test], concluded “Once other features of student, family and school background are held constant, computer availability at home shows a strong statistically negative relationship to math and reading performance, and computer availability at school is unrelated to performance.” But yet we continue to spend huge amounts of our school budgets on updating our digital tools.
So what exactly is going on that is causing our scores to plummet? Well, the obvious is that students are spending too much time online connecting with their peers that they just spent the entire day with at school. This is time taken away from doing their homework, because it is just ‘too borrring’ and catching up on the latest gossip or teen trends or playing quick paced games is much more fun. AOL even has a page titled “Look at Pretty Pictures” with the subtitle “Because it’s better than homework.”
Another cited reason for poor scores is the difference in word inventories and the change in the reading ability of students. A low-reading, high-viewing childhood can make a difference in word inventories of several thousand words by the time a child reaches kindergarten. This gap never becomes smaller and only grows bigger as the child continues their academic career. This affects students’ verbal skills and their ability to be competitive academically and then later, professionally. But what interested me the most was the latter reason: the change in how students read when they are online. A consulting firm, Nielsen Norman Group, in California researched the Web reading and screen habits of teens and young adults. As the book states: “Nielsen has no stake in grand pronouncements about the Digital Age, and no speculations about “new literacies” or “digital natives” or “learning styles” surface in his reports. Instead, he bestows concrete, evidence-based recommendations regarding site design…He consults a more mundane factor, the habits and reactions of regular users in their routine usage.” I quote so that you realize that this researcher does not have any bias or reason to make conclusions that would seem a stretch to someone in an opposing camp. Nielsen found that whatever students are doing while they are online, it definitely isn’t reading as we know it with books. It is more skimming and scanning and jumping to another page if they don’t find anything of interest. He even came up with a name for that type of reading in his April 2006 study:”F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content”. The readers eyes will track all the way across the first line or title but will soon be only looking at the far left side of the page, slowing in the middle (to form the second part of the capital F) and quickly falling down to the bottom of the page. As you can imagine, reading comprehension falls just as quickly.
At the end of the chapter, Mr. Bauerlein lays the blame of students’ academic demise on three separate groups. Students because, “They don’t realize that success in popular online youthworlds breeds incompetence in school and in the workplace.” Parents, “because it (technology) eases the demands of parenting, but they might be a little less inclined to do so if they weren’t led to believe in the intellectual benefits of screen time.” An lastly, “Blame, also, the teachers…who will not insist upon the value of knowledge and tradition, who will not judge cultural novelties by the high standards set by the best of the past, who will not stand up to adolescence and announce, “It is time to put away childish things.” Well said.