The National Center For Educational Statistics has released a new study summarizing student use of computers and the Internet. The data for the study were collected in 2003 (evidently the government has no graduate students anxious to graduate working on the data they collect).
A few findings that I consider important:
1) Students use computers and the Internet to complete school assignments at school and at home (unfortunately, details are lacking).
2) There are significant “digital divide” issues in what students do with technology outside of schools.
3) In school access to technology could be described as addressing differences in access that exist outside of school.
4) There were no sex differences in overall levels of use.
NCES seems committed to a longitudinal approach allowing them to track trends. In general, this is a useful strategy and only practical for organizations able to commit considerable resources to a topic. My concern with the existing approach is that it limits the opportunity to focus the resources behind the research on new issues. Given concerns related to how much (not whether) students use computers and the educational tasks students use technology to accomplish, I wish the protocol would be modified or refocused to consider some new topics.
I happen to be reading a related article today from the EDUCAUSE REVIEW that also concerned digital divide issues. The review article was citing data from 2004 on “access.” I did not read the source to determine when the data were actually collected. Access and how we define access changes so quickly. I remember a few years ago when the metric was whether or not a school had a connection. At some point, these data were meaningless for purposes of comparison because the trend line had reached a point at which little growth was possible. In contrast, a more recent point of comparison was the percentage of classrooms with at least 4 computers with an Internet connection. When defined in this fashion, some variability was evident.
The research process can be slow. However, these are not complex methodologies and the statistics are elementary. The review process would seem less time consuming than one might expect from a high end research journal. These are data suited to policy decisions more so than fine-grained theoretical arguments. This would seem to be a situation in which the target is moving faster than data can be collected to fix its location.
