The Evidence Against Classroom Technology is Getting Hard To Ignore

The mounting evidence against classroom technology is getting hard to ignore.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post explaining why - despite having a PhD in Instructional Technology - I hardly ever take advantage of the laptops that my school provides for every student.  Students' relationship with devices, I posited, changed dramatically once they started having their own devices.  Using a family member's phone or tablet, once upon a time when that's what kids did, is very different from using your own phone or tablet as a child.  The same, I found, went for laptops at school; students had very different expectations for and relationships with school laptops in computer labs back in the day than they do with "their own" laptops that we issue to them now.

​The case I made was purely anecdotal and qualitative: in my personal situation, classroom technology is rarely worth it anymore.  It used to be, but now it isn't.

Two years later, I've seen an explosion of op-eds and case studies making the same case, but this time from a quantitative perspective.
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Shared classroom devices were wonderful!

In September, technology ethicist Cal Newport published a case study of a school in rural West Virginia that has never - never - had wifi.  Doing some digging after this "unfortunate" school was profiled in the Washington Post, Newport noticed that the school had a smaller Covid achievement dropoff and a faster recovery afterward than other schools.  The Covid pandemic, not coincidentally, is when my district switched from shared classroom devices to individually-issued ones.  It also, in my experience, is when the lion share of children went from using family devices at home to being given their own phones, tablets, and laptops.

One of my favorite features of Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics is that it is a device-free learning experience.

A few months later, I came across this piece from noted psychologist and author Jean Twenge entitled The Screen that Ate Your Child's Education.  Twenge cites a huge amount of eye-opening research in this piece regarding both personal and school technology use and its impact on educational outcomes in several different countries.  All of it can be summed up pretty easily: more time on devices at school leads to worse educational outcomes, and more time on devices outside of school does, too.
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​In January, The Economist chimed in with Ed Tech is Profitable - It is Also Mostly Useless.  In addition to analyzing educational outcomes, the piece also introduced a whole new metric that I've been hoping to see raised in this arena - money.  Over the course of my 24 year career, I couldn't begin to imagine the amount of money we've spent on computers, wireless connectivity retrofitting, interactive boards, software subscriptions, testing platforms, and all manner of other technology in the name of modernization and increased achievement.

Are you ready for the number?

The piece cites $30 billion in educational technology spending in 2024 alone - just in the United States.  And for what benefit?  "An alarming decline in reading and in other subjects," notes the author.

Also in January, Michael Kofoed published The Case for Low Tech Learning.  Another educator bemoaning classroom technology, you might ask?  No.  Dr Kofoed is an economist, too, also outlining not just the decrease in educational outcomes, but the huge public cost paid on its behalf.

​To close out January's prolific month of tech-skeptical publications, teacher-blogger Dylan Kane published the results of his "Tech Free January" experiment in his own classes.  How did it go?  According to Kane,

• Less time was lost to logistical matters involving devices
• Focus increased
• Effort increased
• Attention increased
• The ten students who typically completed the least work online completed nearly 50% more
• He developed an entirely new feedback protocol that wasn't possible using online assignments

Not bad for one tech-free month.
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The most recent piece to cross my reading list comes from Jason Kennedy.  It has a great title - When the Glow Impedes the Grow - and an even better lead graphic that I recommend checking out. There are two things I particularly appreciate about Kennedy's publication.  First, gets into some of the causal mechanics that may be behind the relationship that, for now, has only been established as correlative.  Second he makes an attempt to itemize a limited list of cases in which he thinks technology should be used in classrooms:

• Collaboration
• Creative efforts
• Research

Jason Kennedy is rightly concerned that the digital glow may impede the grow.  The analog glow, in my experience, does not.

​I'm not sure that, if I made my own list, it would match Kennedy's completely, but I really appreciate his idea of deciding when classroom devices are worth it and limiting use to those cases.  I explained my own guiding principle for making that decision in my own piece on why I rarely use devices any more, but I think it would be worthwhile for me to get more specific as Kennedy did.

Kennedy posits that collaboration, creative efforts, and research are the limited list of cases where classroom technology is worth it.

​Kennedy followed this piece up with another tech-skeptical piece called Screen Time Soared While Scores Sank to elaborate on that idea.  "This piece is for all the teachers living in the gap between access and purpose. We handed out devices, but we did not hand out a shared definition of when a screen should earn its minutes. We installed platforms, but we did not consistently protect the conditions learning needs most: attention, friction, talk, retrieval, and visible thinking... We gave the tool, but we didn't set the conditions." 

What a perspective. 

As I said, the mounting evidence against classroom technology is getting hard to ignore.

But what about the evidence for classroom technology?  Every single device and program comes with flyers full of data showing just how effective it is for learning, right?  It does indeed, but that isn't especially trustworthy data in many cases.  It all comes from the companies selling the products, and they have ways of creatively generating the data they want and hiding the data they don't.  I've talked a bit about the ways research can be weaponized in past pieces (like this one, this one, and this one), and it is safe to assume that if the research comes from the company that wants to sell you the very thing that was studied, you should be especially skeptical.  Laurence Holt published an especially great piece called The Five Percent Problem: Online Mathematics Programs May Benefit Most The Students Who Need it Least with an outstanding explanation of one such way they do so.

The mounting evidence against classroom technology is getting hard to ignore.

Do we have definitive, gold-standard, double-blind proof that student device use in and out of school is causing the decrease in educational achievement?  Not to my knowledge, no.  But as I've cited before, we also don't have definitive, gold-standard, double-blind proof that coughing in someone's face spreads germs.  What we do have, however, is an awful lot of evidence that points in that direction, along with some pretty logical ways of connecting the dots. 

Two years ago I started connecting those dots myself when I realized that classroom technology was no longer supporting my goals.  This semester, my students don't even bring their devices to class.
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For now, I don't even have my students bring their school-issued devices to class.

I'll close with a quote from the piece I cited above from The Economist that sums things up nicely.
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Back in 2013, Bill Gates remarked that it would take a decade to know whether education technology really worked. More than ten years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the answer is increasingly clear. Notes Emily Cherkin, an advocate and fed-up parent: “Imagine if all that money had gone into teachers instead.”

Hindsight is 20/20, they say, so it probably isn't fair to judge the decisions of the past ten years this way. The evidence is mounting, however, that perhaps we should spend those hundreds of billions differently over the next ten.
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