Education Technology and the Achievement Gap

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the achievement gap, but it is a topic I find very interesting.

While doing my course work in the School of Education, it was often the go-to example for data sets and sample studies, because... well, because it's a school of education.

Something I have spent a fair amount of time examining is the use of technology in the classroom. I have an open-device policy in my course - yes, even phones are allowed. I helped implement the use of electronic portfolios in the first year writing course here at Davis. I accept some writing assignments in web-based formats and encourage students to write and produce vlog/podcast scripts. Our workshops are performed on shared digital documents. We analyze the vocabulary of texts using Lexical Tutor and the readability index calculator.

I like me some ed tech.

Which is why I was so interested in Slate's piece on ed tech and the achievement gap. Reporting on Susan B. Neuman and Donna C. Celano's research done in Philadelphia (and corroborating that with other studies), the piece points to the following findings:

While technology has often been hailed as the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of evidence indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: It is increasing the gap between rich and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and the less-prepared.

 And this increasing gap isn't about access - which is what I would have suspected.

This has to do, rather, with a phenomenon Neuman and Celano observed again and again in the two libraries: Granted access to technology, affluent kids and poor kids use tech differently. They select different programs and features, engage in different types of mental activity, and come away with different kinds of knowledge and experience. 

In my experience, introducing technology to a classroom means introducing new material to learn. Students have to learn the interface, the way the software frames problems, and the extra steps the technology introduces.

Students who come from households that have stressed the US style of schooling from an early age are more likely to have the "cognitive space" to take on some of that extra learning.

All too often, technology is treated like another tool that can be thrown into an existing curriculum. The thinking is, "Hey, this should make things easier for the students, because that's what technology does, right?"

I think this article points to how and why that kind of assumption needs to be examined closer.