<p> And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.<br /><br />Still, wherever there is a low-income household unboxing the family’s very first personal computer, there is an automatic inclination to think of the machine in its most idealised form, as the Great Equaliser. In developing countries, computers are outfitted with grand educational hopes, like those that animate the ‘one laptop per child’ initiative. The same is true of computers that go to poor households in the United States.<br /><br />Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.<br /><br />Vouchers to buy PCs<br /><br />Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers.<br /><br />“We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”<br /><br />Malamud and his collaborator, Cristian Pop-Eleches, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, did their field work in Romania in 2009, where the government invited low-income families to apply for vouchers worth 200 euros (then about $300) that could be used for buying a home computer.<br /><br />The programme provided a control group: the families who applied but did not receive a voucher. They showed the same desire to own a machine, and their income was often only slightly above the cut-off point for the government programme.<br /><br />In a draft of an article that the ‘Quarterly Journal of Economics’ will publish early next year, the professors report finding “strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian”. The principal positive effect on the students was improved computer skills.<br /><br />Playing games<br /><br />At that time, most Romanian households were not yet connected to the internet. But few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.<br /><br />In the US, Jacob L Vigdor and Helen F Ladd, professors of public policy at Duke University, reported similar findings. Their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, ‘scaling the digital divide,’ published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period.<br /><br />Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighbourhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.<br /><br />The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was not universal, but was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesised, parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment unrelated to homework and reducing the amount of time spent studying. <br /></p>
<p> And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.<br /><br />Still, wherever there is a low-income household unboxing the family’s very first personal computer, there is an automatic inclination to think of the machine in its most idealised form, as the Great Equaliser. In developing countries, computers are outfitted with grand educational hopes, like those that animate the ‘one laptop per child’ initiative. The same is true of computers that go to poor households in the United States.<br /><br />Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.<br /><br />Vouchers to buy PCs<br /><br />Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers.<br /><br />“We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”<br /><br />Malamud and his collaborator, Cristian Pop-Eleches, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, did their field work in Romania in 2009, where the government invited low-income families to apply for vouchers worth 200 euros (then about $300) that could be used for buying a home computer.<br /><br />The programme provided a control group: the families who applied but did not receive a voucher. They showed the same desire to own a machine, and their income was often only slightly above the cut-off point for the government programme.<br /><br />In a draft of an article that the ‘Quarterly Journal of Economics’ will publish early next year, the professors report finding “strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian”. The principal positive effect on the students was improved computer skills.<br /><br />Playing games<br /><br />At that time, most Romanian households were not yet connected to the internet. But few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.<br /><br />In the US, Jacob L Vigdor and Helen F Ladd, professors of public policy at Duke University, reported similar findings. Their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, ‘scaling the digital divide,’ published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period.<br /><br />Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighbourhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.<br /><br />The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was not universal, but was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesised, parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment unrelated to homework and reducing the amount of time spent studying. <br /></p>