THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

The Impact of Technology on Student Achievement in the elementary Grades

The Impact of Technology on Student Achievement

The advance of technology provides both benefits and challenges to the classroom. What it means to be educated is changing as can be deduced from the phrase "computer literate", a term itself that begs further definition. Is being able to turn the computer on and use a word processor, spreadsheet and database enough to warrant the tag computer literate?

In a similar way can somebody now be classified as fully mobile if they cannot drive a car. The fact that a person can drive a car increases their job prospects, increases their personal freedom and enables them to participate in many of the activities that are taken for granted in a modern industrial society. Therefore it could be said that somebody who is computer literate has academic mobility through the roads of knowledge, and can share their understanding with more people more quickly. However as we speed through the countryside in our cars we travel so fast we miss many things that we would see and enjoy if we traveled more slowly-the destination becomes more important than the journey.

Technology in the classroom feeds the modern fixation with speed and instant gratification. A word document can be crafted in multiple scripts, pictures cut and pasted, and a finished article of sophisticated appearance completed with a few key strokes; but does the learner understand the content, has the knowledge been broken down and reconstituted into new arguments. The level of understanding can only be ascertained by reading what has been produced, but in the age of cut and paste the amount of mental processing is greatly reduced, and often the educator is duped into accepting something shallow and glossy as evidence of understanding.

Most teenage children can be taught to drive a car, but whether it is wise to teach them is doubtful. Before a person is let loose on the roads they need a level of maturity to be able to resist the temptation to drive too fast and to take unnecessary risks. Similarly before a pupil can drive a computer through the roads of knowledge she will need a level of academic maturity to be able appreciate the limitations of the machine and to understand how those limitations are related to and extend from her own limitations. To be able to manipulate a function in a spread sheet is not quite the same thing as being able to explain a function in terms of independent and dependent variables.

Academic enabler is a term that has been used to characterize the attitudes and behaviors of students (e.g., motivation, interpersonal skills, study skills, engagement) that facilitate active participation in classroom instruction (DiPerna & Elliott, 2000). Investigators (Elliott, DiPerna, Mroch, & Lang, 2004) have documented the prevalence of specific academic enablers and explored the relations between individual academic enablers and students' mathematics achievement at the elementary level ...