At the school level, computers are used in different ways in higher socio-economic status (SES) communities than in lower ones.  This is not so much a matter of opportunity to use computers at all—the proportion of teachers who report weekly use of computers by their students is not lower in high-poverty schools than elsewhere; in fact, among secondary teachers it is substantially higher . (See Table 1.) Instead, school-level socio-economic differences appear in the subjects for which students use computers and in the objectives that their teachers have for that use. 

Teachers in high poverty elementary and middle schools are more likely than others to select "remediation of skills" and "mastering skills just taught" as their primary objectives for student computer use.  (See Table 2.)  Secondary teachers in poorer communities are more likely to see computers as valuable for teaching students to work independently.  Teachers in high SES schools, in contrast, are more likely to use computer work to teach students to present information to an audience and (at middle and high schools) to analyze information.  Elementary teachers at high SES schools are more likely than other elementary teachers to use computers to teach students written expression and for teaching computer skills themselves. 

The accompanying figure exemplifies these findings.  That is, teachers of students within the lowest SES quartile are much more likely to concentrate on reinforcing and remediating students' skills and having students learn to work independently as goals for computer use while those of higher SES students tend to focus on more "constructivist" student activity such as using computers to present their work, analyze information, communicate electronically, and work in collaboration with others.

Each of these differences suggests that schooling with computers in lower-SES schools involves very traditional practices and images of student learning, whereas much more intellectual purposes are served by computers in schools in better-off communities.

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