Is tech 'abstinence' the answer? Screen time can be learning time

The child looking at a screen may be playing a mindless game, staring at porn, doomscrolling or just marking time while the teacher works with needier students, writes Zach Groshell. That's why the tech abstinence movement is spreading. But educational technology can be educational, if designed and implemented properly.

Groshell observes teachers for a living, and sees a lot of bad ed tech and mediocre ed tech used badly. (Of course, he sees a lot of everything done badly.) But it's a mistake to ask schools to ignore the potential of technology, he argues. He envisions the high schooler who needs an app to get them to their GED, the math-loving child who needs an app like Math Academy to be challenged or the immigrant student who needs direct instruction from a tutoring app to get up to speed.

Tech teetotallers argue that "screens are not human," and "children need human connection" to learn, he writes. "A machine cannot love a child." True enough. But "a book is not a human either," yet it can "reveal the wonders of the universe."

He has no problem with parents who seek a low-tech or no-tech school for their own children, Groshell writes. But technology could be a game changer for some children.

Ed tech can be "the solution to a problem" or "the problem," writes Daisy Christodoulou. Teaching quality varies enormously, she writes. Technology, with its "ability to deliver consistent quality at scale," is "perhaps the most democratic force in existence." Take the printing press, which made books available to everyone, or recorded music, which lets everyone list to world-class performances.

We're not there yet with education, she writes. "Remote learning" during the pandemic was a flop: Kids did not learn much at home, that data show. "Even the inconsistent in-person school is still better than learning remotely on screen."

For elementary students, learning requires human-to-human interaction, Christodoulou writes. Intelligent tutoring systems try to reproduce this interaction, but they're not very good at it. She thinks we may never develop tech-centric classrooms that work for children under 11. And some of the issues remain for older students.

People learn differently on screen versus learning on paper, she writes. "We skim and scan more when we read on screen, we think differently when we take notes on laptops, and there are powerful “mode effects” that lead to students doing worse when they take tests on-screen than on paper."

She recommends that students take tests with pencil and paper, but with AI used to read handwriting and assess their writing.

Christodoulou sees a role for AI-based tutoring to help older students practice what the human teacher has taught.

And she thinks technology could make high-quality professional development for teachers easier to access and more efficient.