
Classroom Technology Doesn’t Make the Grade - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-25/classroom-computers-little-benefit-seen-in-test-scores-for-cost
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dxbydt
Tech for testing is a good idea. You get the same adrenaline rush playing
“race the teacher” type math games as in a live classroom test. You are timed,
you know exactly how long you work on each problem, you can identify your
strengths & weaknesses, & there's no need for a proctor to walk around the
classroom. These are objectively good things.

I run a math site for 6-8 year olds & it’s an absolute delight to watch kids
challenge each other to be the fastest at fun algebra & geometry puzzles.
Several teachers have told me in person that kids who ace the puzzles on my
site are ready for college. These are little kids in elementary & middle
school! So it makes me very happy to have built something which is so powerful
for reinforcing core concepts.

But then, some of the parents ask me how to get their kids to score higher.
How to work some of these tests. Which youtube videos to watch. I tell them
not to waste their time on tech.

If you want your kid to learn math, the best is one on one instruction. I sit
with my kid for a few hours every week and we work problems on a whiteboard.
Kids like markers & sometimes they will doodle with red & green markers while
trying to think. This is incredibly fun to watch and it’s an awesome bonding
exercise. I write a problem with a black marker & each kid has a color marker
& they quickly start writing on different areas of the whiteboard and soon we
have a solution. The $20 walmart whiteboard is an absolute godsend. We have a
ton of markers & 3 whiteboards, one in basement & living room & upstairs, so
whenever we feel like it, we can indulge in math. That’s the height of
technology I’ve used.

Give your kids time & attention. That’s really all they want.

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thundergolfer
Education is getting its own spin on “You can see the computer revolution
everywhere except the productivity numbers”.

There was so much research saying all the millions we were about to spend on
tech in classrooms wasn’t going to work. Reduce childhood poverty and you’ll
improve results. Focus on a knowledge based curriculum and you’ll improve
results[1].

1\. Why Knowledge Matters - ED Hirsch Jr

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lotsofpulp
> Reduce childhood poverty and you’ll improve results.

Everyone knows this, but wealth redistribution is opposed by those who can
prevent it from happening, i.e. those with wealth.

So we continue wasting taxpayer’s money and instead funnel that into some
VC/PE/index fund owner’s pocket.

~~~
ch4s3
We could do a lot to reduce poverty without an extra dollar or redistribution.
We could end the drug war, expunge non-violent criminal records, remove lots
of occupational licensing requirements, and make it easier to claim benefits.

~~~
lotsofpulp
The goal would be to allow parents to spend more time with their children, and
have more resources (money and knowledge) to share with their children.

I don’t see how this can be accomplished without some sort of wealth
redistribution, by which I don’t strictly mean transferring dollars from one
account to another, but rather forcing all businesses to provide more time
off, thereby increasing labor costs and hence reducing income for capital
owners.

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0xcde4c3db
As far as I've seen, educational tech products are mostly garbage. It might be
that the worst players are sucking up the most money and attention via
marketing and political shenanigans, but I honestly don't get the impression
that anyone is even trying to genuinely execute well in this area. It
basically feels like stuff made solely to tick boxes and not actually empower
users.

~~~
yorwba
There are several factors that I think contribute to this:

1\. Education takes time. Therefore, evaluating whether an intervention
actually improves education outcomes also takes time.

2\. Decision makers both in companies and in schools buying their products are
not end users, so their interaction with the product is limited.

3\. Most learners hate the work it takes to actually learn something, so
they'll prefer technology that helps them avoid that work.

In the end you get products that look good in a short demo and are well-
received by students, but that don't really help in the long term.

~~~
jacobolus
> _Most learners hate the work it takes to actually learn something_

This is nowhere close to true. People love learning things and exploring new
ideas, in a context where they have autonomy.

Essentially every human learns a tremendous amount about a wide range of
topics and skills between age 5–20 years, with or without any explicit
external instruction.

What they hate is being forced by someone else to do (what seems to them to
be) pointless busywork.

Products which are marketed to schools as “educational technology” often seem
especially pointless from a student perspective.

~~~
yorwba
> This is nowhere close to true. People love learning things and exploring new
> ideas, in a context where they have autonomy.

There are many people who say they want to learn a foreign language or an
instrument or some other skill and many free resources for self-study are
available. Yet, most of those people either never start or give up halfway.
Either they do not want what they say they want, or they're too lazy to put in
the necessary work.

I'm a self-taught developer and learned a few languages on my own, but there's
still a lot I wanted to learn but never did simply because I didn't feel like
practicing and stopped.

~~~
jacobolus
That does not demonstrate that people “hate the work it takes to learn”. It
only demonstrates that someone’s passively stated desire to learn some
particular thing does not immediately grant them the intrinsic motivation,
time, and external support to follow through.

Just because someone doesn’t spend every waking moment on deliberately
practicing specific new skills does not mean that they hate putting effort
into anything.

Most “free resources for self-study” are crap, and only work for people with
unusual amounts of motivation and focus. This doesn’t mean that everyone else
is just lazy. People lead busy lives and have many distractions competing for
their attention.

If you just said “many people claim they want to learn various specific skills
and subjects but then never make time for it”, that would be an
uncontroversial and easily factually supported claim.

* * *

Motivation is pretty tricky. It would be beneficial to everyone if society
spent more effort on teaching meta-skills like how to break large goals into
small manageable chunks, how to manage time and focus, how to seek out
resources, how to evaluate progress, etc., and more effort on offering people
meaningful support for achieving their own goals.

From what I have seen most “educational software”, testing-focused pedagogy,
de-professionalization of teachers, etc. are harming rather than helping.

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seibelj
I fully believe you could get a first-rate education with only a chalk board
and a tree for shade. Similarly, soldiers and body builders in the Soviet
Union did their training with a pull up bar, a bench, and a few free weights.
You don’t need much equipment for anything if your technique is good and the
same applies to education.

~~~
hnhg
For as long as we humans have existed, we've sought for better and more
effective tools, and now you're saying that's overrated?

~~~
coffeefirst
Not at all. But we also have a bad habit of conflating flashy new tools with
effective ones.

~~~
rjf72
I'd also add to this that these technologies can be disruptive in another
tangential fashion. It's not like a school can ever reach the point of being
100% technologically integrated. You can always have more tools, more
software, and more technology in general.

And so if at some point you do not step back and say, _" You know, I think our
problem might be that our current trajectory is fundamentally failing to
improve the educational process."_, then you can effectively spend an infinite
amount of time, energy, and money pursuing a task that is not, and will not,
ever provide the results that you're seeking - yet there you are convincing
yourself that all you need is a bit more money, a bit more time, or the
hottest new tech.

And the view will always be controversial because there is an immense amount
of money to be made in providing these tools and that money will fight back.
It's also quite intuitive that technology should be able to provide
substantial improvements in education, and so those driven by their intuition
will also fight back. Unfortunately, something being intuitive and something
being correct are far from the same thing.

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tsumnia
"But until these tools offer clearer and more widespread benefits for
students, they should be evaluated with serious skepticism."

This is the biggest takeaway I saw from this article. Specifically because
measuring improvement in education is difficult. The most used metric for this
is through the use of something known as a "learning gain". Typically, this is
measured using a pre-test/post-test on a topic, with the intervention method
in between. However, because an experiment needs to be strongly maintained,
these experiments are often done on smaller scales, like for two to four
weeks. Thus, the learning gains are only measured for a single topic.
Semester-long or longitudinal studies are more difficult simply because it is
harder to measure and control improvement over time while ensuring each
student is given a chance to learn the material.

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orev
It’s the same mistake made by both tech companies and grandmas — that
“engagement” == “value”. People who spend more time on sites, and kids who
spend more time on iPads, does not make them experts in tech; just their
ability to consume.

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grendelt
This article leans heavily on NAEP tests which the US has never placed at the
top on. Yet we still have the highest number of the world's best institutions
of higher education.

In education research, if the NAEP is the only metric you're using, your
findings are probably skewed from the get-go.

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rayrrr
I find it a bit circumspect that the article specifically mentions that a lack
of adequate teacher training with EdTech tools is certainly to blame for its
limited impact, but mentions it only once in passing and instead concludes
that hitting the brakes is the solution.

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madengr
Our elementary school provides iPads in all grades, taking them home starting
in 3rd. I was horrified to see my 5th grader zooming into math worksheets and
using her finger to work out the problems between the text. We put a stop to
that and had her work it on paper, then submitting a photo.

Now in 8th grade, at least it is more paper based, but they are still provided
laptops. She told me one of the teachers pre-records the lectures, and they
watch those in class, instead of live instruction. I suppose the teacher
thinks she can record it once and use it for several years.

Now I know why IQ peaked in the 90’s and has been dropping after the
introduction of the smart phone.

~~~
vo2maxer
What’s being used in your child’s 8th grade class is the flipped classroom
strategy [1], as already mentioned. In my own experience through two graduate
degrees, I rarely saw the benefit of attending a live class. I now come to
find, many years later, that students’ class attendance in some graduate
programs is at an all time low [2], and seems not to make a difference [3].

I encourage my 5th grade daughter to do both. She’ll workout problems with pen
and paper or on a white board, and complement her studies with online tools
[4,5,6]. Based on this regimen with a sample of one, she’s done very well. ;-)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom?wprov=sfti1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom?wprov=sfti1)
[2] [https://www.statnews.com/2018/08/14/medical-students-
skippin...](https://www.statnews.com/2018/08/14/medical-students-skipping-
class/) [3] [https://www.usnews.com/news/education-
news/articles/2018-06-...](https://www.usnews.com/news/education-
news/articles/2018-06-19/study-medical-student-attendance-doesnt-mean-better-
grades) [4] [https://beastacademy.com/](https://beastacademy.com/) [5]
[https://aopsacademy.org/](https://aopsacademy.org/) [6]
[https://www.curriculumassociates.com/products/i-ready](https://www.curriculumassociates.com/products/i-ready)

~~~
yorwba
> flipped classroom

>> She told me one of the teachers pre-records the lectures, and they watch
those in class, instead of live instruction.

That's not flipped classroom, it's some weird cargo-cult hybrid combining the
drawbacks of pre-recorded lectures with the drawbacks of in-classroom
lectures.

The whole point of flipped classroom is to move mostly non-interactive stuff
like lectures out of the classroom by assigning them as homework, while moving
exercises that were previously considered homework into the classroom where a
teacher is available to answer questions.

I hope OP's daughter at least gets a copy of the video she can re-watch later.

~~~
vo2maxer
I am sorry I missed that essential detail in your sentence. I agree, that’s
not the flipped classroom strategy. You’re right to be uneasy about that
teacher’s approach which does sound like a class on autoteacher for a few
years. I had a teacher in 10th grade that would ask us to read any book we
had, while he put his head on his desk and “meditated.”

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neonate
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