The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (30 page)

For the vast majority of students, the impact of the latest gadgets on reading, writing, and math skills—compared to students’ performance in less wired classrooms—can be summarized in three words:
no significant differences
.
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For example, bringing in touch-sensitive digital-projector-ready whiteboards makes class time more entertaining for the students and toggling between video and blackboard smoother for the teacher, a British research team found.
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But ultimately the data suggest that it’s a teacher’s ability to weave this new technology into meaningful interactions with students that makes a difference to learning.
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In other words, it’s not the technology, it’s the teacher.

Overall, evaluations of experimental laptop programs using different types of software and involving tens of thousands of high-school students have shown anemic results. A perfect example is Michigan’s laptop program, loftily named Freedom to Learn. When eight matched pairs of schools in the program were compared after two years, there were no differences between the laptop and the control
schools.
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Lukewarm results were also the outcome of a four-year study of five thousand middle-schoolers in laptop programs in Texas.
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Confirming research keeps pouring in. No matter how many students are studied and (with the exception of one fourth-grade program) regardless of the software used, laptops in the classroom do not improve students’ achievement. In some cases they make things worse. In one huge American study of ten thousand sixth-graders from thirty-three different school districts, for example, the laptop kids’ math skills fell behind those of their peers.
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Sadly, there seems to be no support for the chestnut that classroom technology allows students to learn at their own pace. “There was no evidence linking technology immersion with student-directed learning or satisfaction with school work,” the Texas researchers stated baldly. Just like their classmates, students in laptop programs said they found high school meaningless. And while the laptop-program kids were less likely to act out in class, they were also more likely to be absent. (Other studies, too, show that intense Internet users are more likely to skip school, especially if they’re girls.) Like many current university students, they probably surmised that if their instruction was mainly delivered electronically, there was no point in going to class.
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After all, they could just go online.

IS IT THE TECHNOLOGY OR IS IT THE TEACHER?

One slushy day in early spring I observed a second-grade class to which a parent had donated thirty new iPads, no strings attached. Neither the parent nor the school had suggested how the teacher should integrate these electronic jewels into her teaching, so, left to her own devices, she decided to use them to read an e-book of
The Velveteen Rabbit
. Despite this teacher’s excellent intentions and her superb face-to-face teaching skills, the seven-year-olds’ first chapter-book reading experience instantly became more focused on adjusting font size, swiping pages, and inserting color-coded Post-it notes than it was on the bittersweet meaning of the story.

As the class was winding down and lining up for gym, the teacher showed the class a dog-eared paperback copy of
The Velveteen Rabbit
and asked if anyone wanted one. One girl lifted her hand tentatively. The rest looked down at their shoes or scanned the perimeter of the classroom so as not to make eye contact. Only when the teacher assured them that they didn’t have to trade their free iPads for the book did their hands go up, one by one.

One reason for classroom technology’s lackluster impact on learning may be that most teachers haven’t received any subject-specific training in how to use it. Indeed, a study of ten thousand classrooms found that class laptops were rarely used to teach something new; they were deployed primarily to display content or to drill skills that had already been taught.
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On a small scale, though, there have been successes with some kids in some places under certain conditions. For example a selection of schools participating in the state of Maine’s universal laptop program for seventh- to ninth-graders showed that after their laptops arrived, the older kids’ writing improved, as did some of the students’ math skills—as long as their teachers had received “a well-designed and executed professional development program.”
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The training program beefed up the teachers’ knowledge of math with face-to-face and online workshops, targeted their classroom practices to improve their teaching skills, provided “professional learning communities” of other math teachers so they could mentor each other, and finally, helped them integrate the new technology into their teaching. If experimental laptop-class teachers participated in such training for two years, their students’ math scores improved slightly more than the control group’s did (the experimental group improved by 22 percent while the control group improved by 20 percent).

Any teacher who gets all that extra training
should
get better at her craft, laptops or no laptops. The way the study was designed, we can’t know whether it was the teacher training or the laptops that made the difference. But based on what we know about
effective classrooms—namely, that a highly skilled teacher is the best predictor of learning (mattering more to kids’ learning success than any other factor, even class size, race, or financial background)—I suspect that teacher training is the key. Only a skilled teacher who knows how to integrate the technology into her interactions with students gets results.
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Being assigned to a more effective teacher can raise a student’s math scores by as much as 50 percentile points over three years, according to statisticians William Sanders and June Rivers. In fact, having a great teacher for just one year between the fourth and eighth grade boosts a student’s odds of attending college, earning significantly more than other students, living in better neighborhoods, and saving more for retirement, according to a study of 2.5 million American families by economists Raj Chetty, Jonah Rockoff, and John Friedman. That one year with a great teacher—regardless of family income or access to laptops—also predicted a smaller likelihood of a girl getting pregnant as a teenager.
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Forming a relationship with an inspiring teacher can also attenuate the genetic roll of the dice. A study of identical twins assigned to different classrooms has shown that those with a close relationship to their teachers were less aggressive than their genetically identical siblings. It’s not that genes are irrelevant, but that a teacher who establishes a good rapport with a student can damp down his or her belligerence. “Teachers, next to parents, are the most influential adults in a child’s life,” said Mara Brendgen, the study’s author.
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Face-to-face contact with a skilled teacher for even one year in a child’s life has more impact than any laptop program has had so far. One can only wonder what might happen if the $10.5 million a small state like Maine spends annually on its laptop program each year were spent on teacher training instead. Now,
that
would be an interesting experiment.

Still, many teachers say they like the laptop programs because the computers streamline their administrative tasks and help them
cover more material in class. Along with many parents and students, school personnel often believe that building teaching around classroom technology prepares their students for the future and makes their schools more marketable.
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So far, though, the keyboarding, file organizing, Internet researching, tablet using, emailing, chatting, Skyping, blogging, and link posting that comprise most adults’ Internet skills haven’t required much prior academic training (my parents, eighty and eighty-six, have become expert at these tasks despite having written with fountain pens in high school). And as for more efficiency, when teachers click through their PowerPoint bullets, they often move more quickly than adolescents’ brains do. The tendency for teachers to gloss over complex or controversial topics is the reason why many kids, including my own, call their laptop-based classes “death by PowerPoint.”

ENGAGEMENT VERSUS DISTRACTION

One of the virtues of classroom laptop and whiteboard programs is that many teens say the computers make them feel good.
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In the Maine program, for example, 78 percent of the students agreed that “I am more interested in school when I use my laptop.” Like the kids in the developing world’s One Laptop program, North American and British teens newly equipped with their own personal laptops report that they feel better about themselves.
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If so many teachers and students say that the technology makes them feel more engaged, one might wonder why this renewed interest doesn’t lead to crackerjack school performance. Could it be that the technology is so compelling that its bells and whistles distract kids from learning the hard stuff? When I asked this question of Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford who has written extensively on teaching and technology, he said the only way to know is to ask students what they’re thinking about when they’re on their devices. Even if teachers and parents report that students feel more engaged when the technology arrives, it’s a
mistake to assume this will create an uptick in their learning. “Since there is a novelty effect from high-tech devices and software, such engagement may well wear off after a few months or weeks, and then the supposed effects on achievement—if there are any—dampen,” Cuban told me. Another prominent American educational researcher, Randy Yerrick, champions using technology in the classroom when it’s uniquely suited to the task—in science simulations, for instance, or to teach kids with disabilities. But as an all-purpose academic mood lifter? “That’s a fluffy idea,” he said.

In short, sometimes digital technology trumps personal attention from a well-trained teacher or therapist. When predictability is key, for example, well-designed devices are indispensable. Students on the autistic spectrum, who have trouble reading other people’s emotional states and communicating face-to-face, have benefited from wearable computers that monitor their own physiological signals and the emotions of others. Developed by Rosalind Picard’s Affective Computing group at MIT, such applications allow students to function in the social sphere. Like an invisible doppelganger who whispers in your ear what other people are feeling—and what you should say in response—I can’t imagine a better use for personal computers. Similarly, laptops and tablets have allowed students with grave illnesses to continue their education while in treatment, while digital devices have distracted young patients enough to stay calm without sedation during chemotherapy.
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But such situations are rare. What’s more common, among healthy teens at any rate, is that digital technology distracts. Though there’s little evidence that constant texting, messaging, streaming movies, and playing video games actually cause attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, there is good evidence that hours spent oscillating between these activities mimics ADHD’s symptoms: flighty attention, reduced capacity to harness one’s impulses, and, in the case of hours spent playing video games, disrupted sleep architecture and poor verbal memory.
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The 5 to 10 percent of
adolescents who are addicted to gaming, spending eight to ten hours at a time playing them, have shown neural changes similar to those seen in the brains of alcoholics and cocaine addicts. Compared to healthy teens their own age and sex, the Internet addicts’ brain images revealed less density in areas related to self-awareness, error detection, and self-control.
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The corresponding impairments to thinking and attention suggest why dreadful tragedies have occurred. One British twenty-year-old died of a blood clot that developed during the twelve hours he spent immobilized while playing Xbox games, shortly before he was about to enter university to study game design. Then there was the appalling death of a three-year-old girl who starved to death when her twenty-something mother became so entranced by the hugely popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft that she forgot to feed her. Sometimes, though, the impact of computer game addiction isn’t dangerous, it’s just bizarre. One young man spent six years at the same screen in an Internet café in northern China, eating, sleeping, and playing at the same seat twenty-four hours a day, leaving only to go to the bathroom or to take a shower. “He’s no trouble. In fact we barely hear anything from him at all. He pays his bills and doesn’t upset anyone. The staff almost never talk to him unless there’s a technical problem or he wants some food,” said the café manager.
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Of course, it’s likely that teenagers and young adults with pre-existing problems such as a flighty attention span are particularly drawn to mobile technology’s interruptions and brisk scene changes. But studies that follow kids and their media habits over time and that control for extraneous factors, rule out the idea that the disorder always comes first. It’s not just kids with ADHD who become addicted to their screens. And teenagers are not the only ones who can’t stop playing online games or checking their phones.
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It’s all of us.

Our wireless devices are addictive for a reason. They connect us, and we’re a deeply, profoundly social species. Our big brains grew
to their current size, scientists say, in order to process our complex social interactions. Still, most of us need one special person more than anyone else. The reason that one person is on speed dial is the subject of the next chapter.