Excerpt from Keep: Technology in the Classroom Is Great — When It Works. 3 Questions to Help Determine Whether Ed Tech Will Boost Student Learning:

• U.S. fourth-graders who report using tablets in all or nearly all of their classes are a full year behind in reading ability compared with peers who report never using tablets in their classes.
• Internationally, students who report greater use of technology in their classrooms score worse on the PISA exam
• High levels of technology use in the classroom tend to correlate with lower student performance.
• One recent study found that over a third of all technology purchases made by middle schools simply weren’t used. And only 5 percent of purchases met their purchaser’s usage goals.

The Reboot Foundation says, "Our data suggest that technology may not always be used in a way that prompts richer forms of learning." Their findings make these points:

• Schools and teachers should be more careful about when—and how—education technology is deployed in classrooms.
• Moderate use of technology is often the most effective for younger students, and
• Experts recommend limiting the use of devices for young children
• Technology seems the least helpful for younger students learning to read, and non-digital tools work better for younger students who are mastering the basics of language.
• Digital tools that provide immediate instructional feedback can show high impact, and technology can be particularly beneficial for promoting richer thinking among older students.

Mike Schmoker shares the following points in his book, Results Now:

Research about Reading in the Classroom

• 38% of all 4th graders in the USA (4 out of 10) read at the "below basic" level on NAEP (2005).
• "The truth is that many children read for a remarkably small percentage of the school day...children sometimes spend two and a half hours a day in reading instruction and only ten minutes of that time actually reading," says Lucy Calkins (1998) as cited.
• If 90 minutes per day is devoted to reading or language arts, a 4th grade who read very slowly--at the 2nd grade level--could be reading a novel like Stone Fox every week.
• 15 extra minutes of reading per day can lead to three months of additional growth.
• By 8th grade, 43% of poor students are reading at "below basic" level.
• At the end of 12th grade, the average black or Latino student performs at about the same level as the average white 8th grader (2005).
• Three to four weeks of effective, full-day literacy instruction would allow the average student to gain an entire year of academic growth (Haycock, 2005).
• Few teachers are "modeling and demonstrating useful reading strategies" (Allington, 2001).
• When students were asked to demonstrate their critical reading skills--in writing--they "demonstrated difficulty in providing details and arguments to suport interpretations of what they read" (Allington, 2001).

College Ready?

• Only 32% of college-bound students are academically prepared for college (2004).
• 78% of students wishing to attend college will struggle in writing, biology, and algebra (2004).
• After 12 years of English, a third or more of college students need remedial English. In California State University system, that number is 46 percent (2002).
• Barzun observes that the typical professor is "still trying in graduate school to get decent writing and intelligent reading out of his bright students" (1991).
• 75% of students report that they don't do any writing in history or social studies courses (ASCD SmartBrief, 2003).
• Most U.S. high school students graduate having never written a single extended history paper (2002).

The "information age" places higher-order literacy demands on all of us. These demands include synthesizing and evaluating information from multiple sources. American schools need to enhance the ability of children to search and sort through information, to synthesize and analyze the information they encounter.

Source: Richard Allington (2001), President of IRA, 2005-2006 as cited in Schmoker's Results Now