Study Says OLPC Program Doesn’t Improve Test Scores

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Coming as a shock to absolutely no one, a new study finds that the One Laptop Per Child program doesn't improve test scores. :(

The study, which was conducted by development funding source in Latin America called Inter-American Development Bank, looked at 319 public schools in Peru. It found that although OLPC students were more likely to use computers than their non-OLPC counterparts, the two groups scored about the same on math and language assessments 15 months after laptops were deployed.
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Whoooa.

A liberal progressive idea like giving laptops to children to help them learn turns out it doesn't?

Kind of like the liberal idea of giving you a check if you don't have a job will encourage you to go out and find a job.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
Whoooa.

A liberal progressive idea like giving laptops to children to help them learn turns out it doesn't?

Kind of like the liberal idea of giving you a check if you don't have a job will encourage you to go out and find a job.
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^Winna!

You deserve some tax payers money!
 
Errm. How about the students get quizzed every X amount of time on their laptop? Boom.
 
I fail to see how a computer teaches someone to understand a subject enough that they can score better on tests.
It's like teaching someone kungfu by showing them videos. It just doesn't work.
 
You mean children that live in poverty and broken homes with the looming threat of abuse and violence have a hard time learning even if they own a laptop?

This is my surprised face.:rolleyes:
 
Because computers were the answer, not their parents getting more involved in their lives or anything logical like that...
 
Isn't the idea to give them access, at an early age, to the most useful tool on the planet, to get them familiar with something they will need to know if they are ever going to be successful at almost anything?

Are the low scores from test about computer use?
 
Kids from these types of places will always have educational deficiencies when they and their families care more about putting food on the table than learning. The laptops don't make a difference.

Dr. Righteous said:
Kind of like the liberal idea of giving you a check if you don't have a job will encourage you to go out and find a job.
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@Dr. Righteous: I'm sure our country would look a lot more like a third world country if so many people didn't get government checks. Of course stopping all government assistance won't magically fix everything, it will just make the rich richer because they pay less is tax and hasten the decline of the country.
 
BallerX said:
You mean children that live in poverty and broken homes with the looming threat of abuse and violence have a hard time learning even if they own a laptop?

This is my surprised face.:rolleyes:
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Peruvians are generally more involved positively in their kids lives than many American families. While poverty is a very real threat and hindrance to positive study habits, most parents dont hold education in high regards and focus on preparing their kids for work instead. This is of course due to poverty; however, it is also a generational disconnect. By providing the laptops they alleviated a huge expense, but the kids need to be held accountable the parents just arent focused on college or white collar jobs and as such neither are the kids.
 
American kids have readily available access to computers and the internet, and they're some of the dumbest children in the industrialized world. I don't think there's any real correlation between computer access and academic achievement.
 
Climber said:
It indicates they aren't learning math and languave skills.
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It indicates that they aren't testing well. The skills they're learning may not be applicable to the tests they're taking, assuming they are learning anything.
 
Of course it didn't. They probably spent all their time on Facebook and looking up porn. Maybe if the OLPC only let them use educational software...
 
Did anyone really think this would improve test scores?

If anything it seems like it would just allow kids to become more familiar with using computers.
 
How about it makes kids smarter and more savvy with technology? Test scores are useless if the test is meaningless (not to say this test is, but speaking in general)
 
volt1up said:
Was that the goal, to improve test scores?
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See, that's the problem...I don't think anyone really though past the part where they got this warm and fuzzy feeling inside, so they just threw away hundreds of millions of dollars for the sole purpose of feeling good.

Might as well just handed them hammers for all the good it does.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
American kids have readily available access to computers and the internet, and they're some of the dumbest children in the industrialized world. I don't think there's any real correlation between computer access and academic achievement.
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Truth.
 
to be honest i didn't think this was about test scores. there are other practical learning uses for these kinds of things..

also, i am going to guess that these systems went to places that do not have the internet and computers and probably never have them. Think back to when we first got the internet in homes...what did you do on the internet.

chat rooms,porn still, funny pics? we all had that phase.

that said i don't think i've seen any study that computers directly translate to better or worse test scores. That doesn't mean they don't help people learn good things though...i just think its a non standardized for.

as you can see honestly i'm on the fence on this whole thing.
 
the-one1 said:
I fail to see how a computer teaches someone to understand a subject enough that they can score better on tests.
It's like teaching someone kungfu by showing them videos. It just doesn't work.
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I have a plug in the back of my neck for that.
 
FndTheRver said:
@Dr. Righteous: I'm sure our country would look a lot more like a third world country if so many people didn't get government checks. Of course stopping all government assistance won't magically fix everything, it will just make the rich richer because they pay less is tax and hasten the decline of the country.
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The best motivator to end joblessness is -being hungry-.
But as long as food stamps and a check comes in.............................
 
Dr. Righteous said:
The best motivator to end joblessness is -being hungry-.
But as long as food stamps and a check comes in.............................
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Yep, nothing like having lots of desperate people to take advantage. In any case, whatever system or rules exist there's always those who learn to game it, be they poor or rich.
 
heatlesssun said:
Yep, nothing like having lots of desperate people to take advantage. In any case, whatever system or rules exist there's always those who learn to game it, be they poor or rich.
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The problem is people are condition to put their hand out instead of do for themselves.
There IS NOT A LACK OF JOBS. Just a not a lot of jobs people want.
If you are willing to work there are lots of jobs waiting. I don't mean sweeping floors at McDonald's (even though there is nothing wrong with that) but there is plenty of shift work, warehousing, and other jobs requiring you to use your hands and sit around and run your mouth. Real work of any type is honorable but thinking you are "too good" for certain jobs and rather sit on your ass and draw a check is very DISHONORABLE.
The high joblessness is because there is a GLUT of people that got a worthless degree from a college and skated by in some management role; hold no REAL skills at anything. When a company needs to cut costs, these types have to go. Now they are out of work and consider themselves too good go for any "dirty work". Employers are begging for people with real skills like welding, CNC operators, HVAC, etc, etc. Yes, the kind of skills you learned at trades school. Now these kids are being hired before they graduate because there is such a shortage of people with a solid skill set at a trade.
 
Climber said:
Test anxiety doesnt affect that many.
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As I said, if the skills they're learning with a computer are not the skills they're tested on, then low test scores are not indicative that the children aren't learning. It could be indicative that the things they're learning are the things they aren't tested on. Thus, test scores may not increase, even if the children are learning skills.

The relationship between what a child learns from a course and a test score is predicated on many factors. It's not as simple as "we teach something; test scores should reveal that we taught successfully".
 
swalters said:
Of course it didn't. They probably spent all their time on Facebook and looking up porn. Maybe if the OLPC only let them use educational software...
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They should have just sent out $29.99 VTECHs.
My little girl learned her ABCs when she was 2 1/2 all by herself by playing with her VTECH "laptops". After about a month she starting reciting and reading off the keys.
 
Why do we need technology to learn? Instead give the children toys to play with, that's how my brother and I grew up, we rarely had any time with technology. Both of us are towards the top of our classes compared to many americans that watched TV/used PC's a lot as children who are at the bottom of the classes. Playing with toys > technology.
 
I bet my bottom dollar that they at least learned how to surf! Pr0n that is!
 
I've always hated the way people pretend technology makes for better learning. Lecturers use increasingly flashy powerpoint presentations and tablets to teach, online quizzes and such.

I think the best way to teach is for a teacher to say it, write it on a board or overhead projector by hand, and the student to write it into their notepad at the same time. You hear it spoken, you see it written, you copy it yourself. Even video/online lectures are far less attention grabbing than a live one.

The act of writing things out by hand or watching someone else write something by hand is actually a great tool for learning, it saddens me to see educators throwing it away in favour of technological alternatives. As if somehow seeing the information quicker on a computer screen and downloading them will improve understanding and retention when more often than not it's the opposite.
 
Tudz said:
I think the best way to teach is for a teacher to say it, write it on a board or overhead projector by hand, and the student to write it into their notepad at the same time.
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Don't blame technology. Blame people for not understanding how to us technology. I write things all the time down on my Windows tablets in OneNote. And I can search for keywords find IN HANDWRITING without any conversion to text, just a search on the original handwriting.

Incredibly powerful. What a shame that most people don't even know that this technology exists and is proficient.
 
heatlesssun said:
Don't blame technology. Blame people for not understanding how to us technology. I write things all the time down on my Windows tablets in OneNote. And I can search for keywords find IN HANDWRITING without any conversion to text, just a search on the original handwriting.

Incredibly powerful. What a shame that most people don't even know that this technology exists and is proficient.
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Yeah I had friends who used to take notes on tablets... I never understood why because it's just like a less efficient way of writing on paper, but ok :p

Searching in handwriting, useful yeah, I would hardly call it "incredibly powerful". You know what's also incredibly powerful? Flipping through notes by hand looking to find something, it lets you do a quick review of the course as you are flipping through. My final year thermodynamics lecturer used to write all his course notes by hand, and there were several occasions where I had to find something in them and ended up flicking through the notes and I think it was beneficial to have to just flick through by hand, it gave me time to consider what I was actually looking for, see the context in where it fit in the course and often came across things I'd forgotten about and were useful to know.

One mate of mine was a technology freak through university, he bought a tablet and when everyone else was taking notes on paper he was taking notes in the tablet. He is great with technology, could program complicated things faster than anyone I know and could type a complicated formula as fast as I could write it by hand. But by final year even he was taking in a good old fashion lecture pad and writing his notes by hand.

Of course technology is great when it comes to writing and reviewing long reports/theses and stuff, I'm certainly not saying its ALL bad, but I'm yet to see it used effectively as a teaching tool in anything other than technology based subjects (if you're teaching programming obviously its useful to have a computer there with you, and I'm sure in a computer science degree having a laptop would be very useful).
 
I'll add to that and say one of the benefits of technology is the speed in which you can do things, like you said, doing a word search through handwriting is a massive benefit in speed when reviewing documents or trying to find data.

However speed is often an enemy when it comes to actual understanding and retention of information.

When I was doing my undergraduate just a couple of years ago I can safely say most of the people who were top 10% of the class were quite technologically capable, but when it came to studying, taking notes, exam prep, the top students all had big piles of paper which and were flicking through to do questions/read notes/write answers even though all had laptops, some even had tablets and were all capable of using them.
 
Tudz said:
Searching in handwriting, useful yeah, I would hardly call it "incredibly powerful". You know what's also incredibly powerful? Flipping through notes by hand looking to find something, it lets you do a quick review of the course as you are flipping through.
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You've obliviously not used OneNote because this is the easiest thing one can do in OneNote.
 
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