Navtej Kohli

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Mumbai , India

Thursday 26 June 2014

Educational Technology Isn’t Leveling the Playing Field

The native name for the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington is “the Badlands,” and with smart reason. Pockmarked with empty tons and burned-out row homes, the world has AN percentage of twenty nine % and a economic condition rate of ninety %. simply some miles to the northwest, the civilised neighborhood of Chestnut Hill looks to belong to a distinct universe. Here, educated professionals search the boutiques on Germantown Avenue and come home to gracious stone and brick homes, the typical value of that hovers higher than $400,000.

Within these terribly completely different communities, however, area unit 2 places remarkably similar within the resources they provide: the native public libraries. every has been retooled with banks of recent computers, the newest computer code and speedy web access. Susan B. Neuman, a academician of time of life and acquisition education at NYU, and adult female C. Celano, AN professor of communication at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, spent many hours within the Chestnut Hill and Badlands libraries, look however patrons used the books and computers on provide.

The two were particularly fascinated by however the introduction of computers would possibly “level the taking part in field” for the neighborhoods’ adolescents, kids of “concentrated affluence” and “concentrated economic condition.” They undertook their observations during a hopeful frame of mind: “Given the creative thinking of those machines and their ability to support children’s self-teaching,” they questioned, “might we start to ascertain a closing of the chance gap?”

Many hours of observation and analysis later, Neuman and Celanano were forced to acknowledge a radically completely different outcome: “The terribly tool designed to level the taking part in field is, in fact, un-leveling it,” they wrote during a 2012 book supported their Philadelphia library study. With the unfold of academic technology, they foreseen, “the not-so-small disparities in skills for kids of richness and kids of economic condition area unit getting ready to get even larger.” Navtej Kohli CDC Podcast : Educational quotes based on Inspiration and Motivation, Teaching, Learning and Education

Neuman and Celano aren't the sole researchers to achieve this stunning and distressing conclusion. whereas technology has typically been hailed because the nice equalizer of academic chance, a growing body of proof indicates that in several cases, school is really having the other effect: it's increasing the gap between made and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and therefore the less-prepared.

This is not a story of the acquainted “digital divide”—a lack of access to technology for poor and minority kids. This must do, rather, with a development Neuman and Celano discovered once more and once more within the 2 libraries: Granted access to technology, affluent youngsters and poor youngsters use school otherwise. They choose completely different programs and options, interact in numerous sorts of mental activity, and are available away with completely different forms of data and knowledge.

The unleveling impact of technology conjointly must do with a development called the “Matthew Effect”: the tendency for early blessings to multiply over time. social scientist Robert Merton coined the term in 1968, creating relation to a line within the gospel of Matthew (“for whosoever hath, to him shall be, and he shall have a lot of abundance: however whosoever hath not, from him shall be abstracted even that he hath”).

In a paper printed in 1986, man of science Keith Stanovich applied the Matthew impact to reading. He showed that kids World Health Organization get off to a robust early begin with reading acquire a lot of vocabulary words and a lot of information, that successively makes reading easier and a lot of pleasurable, leading them to scan still more: a virtuous cycle of accomplishment. kids World Health Organization struggle timely with reading fail to amass vocabulary and data, realize reading even tougher as a result, and consequently copulate less: a dispiriting downward spiral.

Now researchers area unit starting to document a digital Matthew impact, during which the already favored gain a lot of from technology than do the less lucky. like books and reading, the most-knowledgeable, most-experienced, and most-supported students area unit those within the best position to use computers to leap more ahead. For example: within the Technology Immersion Pilot, a $20 million project administrated in Texas public colleges starting in 2003, laptops were arbitrarily assigned  to lyceum students. The advantage of owning one amongst these computers, researchers later determined, was considerably bigger for those students whose take a look at scores were high to start with.

Refer By : http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/06/neuman_celano_library_study_educational_technology_worsens_achievement_gaps.html

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