There’s a new working paper (summary here; PDF here) from Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches called “Home Computer Use and the Development of Human Capital.” As they point out, the “digital divide” (within countries and between them) can be vast, and a great deal of governmental (and non-governmental) resources are being spent to address it. (In the U.S., the authors write, “less than half of children with family incomes under $25,000 lived in a household with a computer, compared to 92 percent of those with family incomes over $100,000.”)
It is a logical assumption that the children with computer access have a huge advantage in gaining human capital, yes?
But the tricky part is untangling the cause and the effect. As we’ve written in the past, children who grow up in homes with a lot of books are likely to do better in school than kids from homes without books — but not necessarily because they spend all their time reading. The data suggest that kids from homes with lots of books simply have smarter parents.
Malamud and Pop-Eleches have found a good variable to exploit in asking a similar question about home computers; from their abstract (emphasis mine):
We collected survey data from households who participated in a unique government program in Romania which allocated vouchers for the purchase of a home computer to low-income children based on a simple ranking of family income. We show that children in households who received a voucher were substantially more likely to own and use a computer than their counterparts who did not receive a voucher. Our main results indicate that that home computer use has both positive and negative effects on the development of human capital. Children who won a voucher had significantly lower school grades in Math, English and Romanian but significantly higher scores in a test of computer skills and in self-reported measures of computer fluency. There is also evidence that winning a voucher increased cognitive ability, as measured by Raven’s Progressive Matrices. We do not find much evidence for an effect on non-cognitive outcomes. Finally, the presence of parental rules regarding computer use and homework appear to mitigate the effects of computer ownership, suggesting that parental monitoring and supervision may be important mediating factors.
So: having a computer at home helps kids develop computer skills. (Okay …) But it seems to lower their grades in math and reading.
There are a lot of lower-school educators out there who will read this with no surprise whatsoever. For all the talk about the digital divide, a lot of educators work hard to keep computers out of the classroom at an early age, to help kids develop skills without them. This is a topic we think about a lot in my home. We have a 9-year-old son who uses his computer for all kinds of stuff — games and sport fantasy leagues, yes, but also reading the news and looking up whatever his brain latches onto: volcanoes, Hitler, left-handed presidents, etc. He also happens to read a lot of books — but would he read more if there were no computer in the house? And would there be a great benefit in that? And will his computer literacy yield greater unforeseen benefits down the road?
I do find it interesting that a lot of parents I know urge their kids to get off the computer while looking down at their own Blackberrys.
(N.B.: Pop-Eleches is the same scholar whose fascinating research on abortion in Romania we wrote about in Freakonomics.)
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As far as math skills are concerned, I believe it is essential to keep kids as far away from anything that can be used as a calculator as possible, computer included. If you want to understand what is going on when doing math doing the calculations in your head is very important. Or at least it was for me.
Correct! Computers don’t belong in schools, or for children at home. They are a distraction from real learning. Teaching soon-to-be obsolete computer skills takes time away from education (schools have computers so students can learn skills only useful on school computers, a solipsism). The internet is not the place to find serious information.
In everyday life (excluding scientific research, reservation systems, accounting, etc.) the only place for computers is to prepare letter-perfect documents. That is an adult job; children don’t need to do it.
A computer is a tool. Unless the kids are being instructed in computer programming, then it should be treated as little more than a high tech typewriter or a ready source of reference material.
I am reminded of a Far Side cartoon that shows a mother and father looking hopefully at their young son and dreaming of a day when he is looking through the want ads at ads for experienced video game players.
About 30 years ago, I went into my bank with a $200. check. I wanted to cash the check, make a $100 deposit, buy a $50. money order and get the rest back in cash.
I ended up with $20 more than I should have. I told the teller I received the wrong amount.
The teller contradicted me. I explained in simple terms: I gave you a $200 check. I made a $100 deposit. That leaves $100 dollars. I bought a $50 money order. That leaves $50 dollars. I can’t get back more than $50 dollars.
The teller entered the transactions into her adding machine again and told me I received the correct amount.
I said, I will keep the money if you want me to, but your drawer will be short. The platform manager overheard this and came over for an explanation. I explained I received $20 too much.
He looked at the teller. She pointed to the adding machine tape.
He told her to take her drawer, her machine, and her tapes to a back room. Not to count it out. Just take it all back as is. He asked me how much over I received. I said $20 dollars. I gave it to him. He thanked me.
Are we talking 3rd grade arithmetic? Yes but, there is more to it. The part that’s missing. The part where the teller says, “Please excuse me, I have to notify the manager.”
If children are not taught to handle the simple process of a third grade arithmetic problem, the computers won’t help them do the math.
Slim.
excerpted from thecleaversmiddleboy
I think one of the basic failings of ‘computer skills’ as taught in most schools is that the students are taught how to use an application or set of applications, and not what a computer actually *does*. Let me clarify: most schools teach “Microsoft Word” or “Adobe Photoshop”; they don’t teach “Memory Structures” or “Storing and Retrieving Data”.
And the difference between those two approaches — and their outcomes for student learning — is enormous. So although my own experience here is obviously anecdotal, it’s something I’ve seen amongst colleagues as well. I learned how to ‘use’ a computer running BASIC and back in 1990/90 had a class in which we had to produce simple things like an address book that could search by first or last name, and a basic bitmap animation of a ship sailing around the screen. We weren’t given a programme to do this for us, we had to write the whole thing from scratch. And it wasn’t actually that hard because we were given time to explore.
Those programming skills lay dormant through much of the rest of high school and most of university, but they meant that when I started to need them again because I got involved in web work (mid-90s). Even though this was many years later and computers had changed (a *lot*) I knew that it should be possible to do what I wanted to do even if there’s wasn’t a handy button to do it all for me.
So by pure luck I acquired a very different mindset from the “But Word doesn’t do that” approach which is taught to many youngsters today. Computer programming can teach students how to think logically, how to map out a problem efficiently, and how to make computers do what *they* want (offering a sense of empowerment even as it will quickly instil annoyance at how truly awful many applications are to use). Application teaching may teach some marginally relevant skills but they are far less likely to give students the power to acquire new computing skills or to think ‘outside the box’ when trying to get our increasingly powerful systems to do something truly original.
I’m all for keeping computers outside of the maths and language classrooms, and all for putting them *in* a proper computing course.
Of course any family who really wants to develop computer skills will simply provide a box of PC parts and a Ubuntu install CD and inform the child to have at it.
Back in my day I had green text on an IMB PC and I was glad to have it!
“would he read more if there were no computer in the house?”
Just curious, but I wonder if the author considered the fact that the vast majority of the internet based information on volcanoes, Hitler, and left handed presidents that was latched onto by his son’s brain were all processed by his son reading the written word. Granted, they were probably not presented in the same format as anything written by Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Carrol or Rowling, but the kid was reading the information just the same.
That’s not to say that it might be more difficult to read something like Of Mice and Men or even Harry Potter after reading the more interesting (and terse) works from the internet. Now that there is more competition in the “reading material” marketplace (as opposed to just comics or The Hardy Boys), children might read works from the 20th century with the same contempt that we read Shakespeare or Beowulf. They might even be using the same “translation” skills that we did to get the information into a format our brain could understand, which could very well account for the correlation between high amounts of reading and high grades.
Either way, I believe that the monopoly of the printed book has long since given way to the electronic format, and that his concept of book-reading as being different from internet-reading is in many ways very “old-fashioned.”
Both of my daughters (ages 5 and
are in advanced reading and math classes at their schools. Both received outstanding on EVERYTHING on their report cards at school. I allow both of them to use the computer for up to 2 hours everyday. We use parental controls and the websites are mostly educational. Computers can be wonderful, if parents know how to use them effectively.