Education Next – Frederick Hess
“New research in the latest issue of Education Next does an elegant job of capturing the perils of ed tech. Researchers Susan Payne Carter, Kyle Greenberg, and Michael Walker report intriguing but disquieting findings from a randomized controlled classroom experiment conducted at West Point (for the in-the-weeds version of their study, check out the February 2017 Economics of Education Review). Payne Carter and her colleagues examined the performance of West Point sophomores in a core economics course. During spring and fall 2015, the researchers assigned participating class sections to one of three groups: technology-free (no use of laptops or tablets during class), technology-at-will (students could use what they liked, as they liked), and tech-limited (tablet-only with restrictions that made it tough for students to text, shop, or update social media). The study wound up encompassing 726 students in 50 classrooms over the two terms.”(more)