Findings

Frequent Use of Computers

Although computers in schools by now number over 10 million, frequent student experiences with school computers occur primarily in four contexts--separate courses in computer education, pre-occupational preparation in business and vocational education, various exploratory uses in elementary school classes, and the use of word processing software for students to present work to their teachers. The one area where one might imagine learning to be most impacted by technology—students acquiring information, analyzing ideas, and demonstrating and communicating content understanding in secondary school science, social studies, mathematics, and other academic work—involves computers significantly in only a small minority of secondary school academic classes.

Exhibit 3 shows the proportion of teachers, by subject, who reported that a typical student in one of their classes used computers on more than 20 occasions during class over roughly a 30-week period. Apart from computer education teachers, a majority of only one other group—business education teachers—reported that computer use occurred on at least a weekly basis in their classes. About two-fifths of vocational education teachers and elementary teachers of self-contained classes also reported roughly weekly use. Among secondary academic subject teachers, the highest rate of frequent use was reported by English teachers (24%). Only one out of six science teachers, one out of eight social studies teachers, and one out of nine math teachers said students used computers that often during their class. Given the distribution of course-taking patterns in high school, it turns out that a majority of students' intensive computer experiences occur outside of academic work, as part of computer education or occupational preparation.

An important determinant of whether a teacher uses computers frequently with her students is whether the computers she has access to are within her own classroom. The correlation across subjects – that is, which subject-matter teachers are most apt to be frequent users and which subject-matter teachers have, say, at least one computer in their classroom for every four students in their class—is rather striking, as Exhibit 4 shows. However, even within subjects, this relation holds. We found that secondary academic subject teachers who have 5 to 8 computers in their classroom are twice as likely to give students frequent computer experience during class than teachers of the same subjects with 1-4 classroom computers but whose classes use computers in a shared lab with at least 15 computers present (62% vs. 32%).[2] This may seem counter-intuitive since being in a lab with three times as many computers as these classrooms have would seem to be preferable. However, the scheduling of whole classes of students to use computers, at wide intervals determined well in advance of need (i.e., weekly or every-other-week use scheduled weeks in advance) makes it almost impossible for computers to be integrated as research, analytic, and communicative tools in the context of the central academic work of an academic class.

Two other factors that influence how likely teachers are to have their students use computers frequently during class are the way their school day is carved up into different classes and the extent to which they feel pressure (self-imposed or externally imposed) to cover large amounts of curriculum. With respect to scheduling, we found that secondary academic teachers who work in schools that schedule classes in longer blocks of time (e.g., 90-120 minutes) were somewhat more likely to report frequent student computer use during class (19% vs. 15%), even though they met their classes on perhaps half the number of days as teachers who taught in traditional 50-minute periods. With respect to content coverage, teachers of academic subjects are strong believers in transmitting a large amount of information or skills during the course of a year. Computer use is often seen as inhibiting the coverage of topics. Yet we found that when teachers don't try to cover a large number of separate topics, but instead teach "a small number [of topics]… in great depth" (only one out of every thirteen academic secondary teachers in the study), they are twice as likely teachers covering a large number of topics to have students use computers frequently (29% vs. 14%).

Teachers' lack of expertise with using computers could be another inhibiting condition of frequent use. Most teachers report at least modest competency in using computers in different ways. But it was not necessarily the case that the most computer-expert teachers were the ones who used computers more with their students. That was the case for vocational education teachers and English teachers. In those subjects, teachers who assigned more computer work also knew more about computers themselves; those who assigned less work, knew less. That was not true, however, for math teachers. In mathematics, teachers who assigned more computer work professed no greater knowledge about how to use computers than did those who assigned less.

At the same time, the ways that teachers have their students use computers are certainly affected by their own level of technical expertise. In particular, teachers who feel capable of developing a document using multimedia authoring software have their students use computers more frequently and use a greater variety of software. This is independently true for teachers of almost every subject, and for most subjects, multimedia-authoring-capable teachers have students use computers more and with a greater variety of software than do other teachers teaching the same subject. A second computer skill associated with a teacher’s having students use computers more and with greater variety is knowing how to prepare a slide show. In particular, among elementary teachers and secondary English teachers, those who say they are able to produce slide shows using presentation software are among the most active computer-assigning teachers in their subject. There seems to be a clear order of difficulty among computer skills that relates to the variety of ways that teachers are able and willing to oversee student computer use. In other words, whether or not the teacher knows how to use a Web browser doesn't have much of an effect on whether they use a type of software with students. But some skills such as producing a slide show or a multimedia document clearly are indicators of a teacher’s ability and interest in having students use computers in a variety of different ways and on a relatively frequent basis.

[2] Based on a 50% random subsample of teachers who used computers with their selected class in both probability and purposive samples.