AS personal computers have become cheaper, more accessible and easier to use, they have begun to play an increasingly important role in children's education at home and in school. The pressing question facing many teachers and parents has now changed in a subtle way from "Should we buy a computer?" to "What kind of computer should we buy?"
The spotlight has shifted from process to tool, from education to the computer. To counteract this change in emphasis, and on the basis that unprincipled educational expenditure is always questionable, this article tries to identify some of the issues involved in buying computers for children.
Specifically, parents and schools need to think critically about certain practical economic and educational issues before investing in computers - otherwise these computers could end up gathering dust in homes and schools. We raise these issues not as Luddites who are suspicious of a new technology, but as researchers who wish to challenge implicit assumptions about the best way to integrate new and traditional educational resources.
Over the past decade, research has shown that certain computer programs (for example those involving the Logo language) can stimulate children's curiosity and convince them that learning can be an enjoyable activity from an early age. However, it has also emerged that without regular monitoring or adequate supervision, computer usage can also become a "mindless" ritual for young learners.
For example, just as students often experience the phenomenon of reading the same sentence in a textbook over and over again without registering its meaning, so too computer users can be "miles away" mentally while staring at their screens - unless they have a specific question which they wish to answer using the computer.
Using a book or computer to find answers to the specific question of why the 1916 Rising occurred, for example, is a more "focused" and challenging mental activity than browsing randomly through a textbook on Irish history with no particular objective in mind. Paradoxically, problems of mental disengagement among computer users may go undetected simply because the medium's interactivity may be mistaken for involvement. The fact that computers may captivate the attention of learners (through sophisticated graphics, for example) can make it difficult to tell whether the user is being led by the program or is actively using it to find an answer to a specific question. Unfortunately, this point may be overlooked by those who advocate naively that children should be "let loose" unsupervised on computers in the vain hope that some form of "discovery learning" (usually unspecified) will occur.
Psychologically, questioning plays a vital role in learning. It helps to focus one's concentration and activates any prior knowledge or expectations which one might have about the new material being encountered. Unfortunately, most educational software packages fail to grasp this because they rarely encourage the user to question what he or she knows about the topic before acquiring the new information.
Interestingly, recent studies of expert teachers show that they use questioning techniques extensively to help students make explicit connections between what they already know and what they are about to learn. By implication, good educational software should attempt to exploit this finding by encouraging self monitoring by the learner,
Little progress has been made on this issue, largely because most educational software has been developed without reference to established psychological principles. Many educational programs lack routines to enable the computer to store or provide feedback on the user's progress as he or she works through the program. This is a serious flaw as people need feedback in order to consolidate their learning regardless of whether their instructor is a person or a PC.
By the way, it is often claimed that the more "realistic" the graphics in a computer program, the greater is the program's efficacy in stimulating interest and learning. Although relatively little research exists on this question, there is some evidence from studies of pictorial comprehension that people may learn more from line drawings than from realistic photographs when tackling biology material in textbooks.
Apparently, detail is not always conducive to learning. Overall, therefore, we urge parents and teachers to consider carefully how best to integrate questioning activities with educational computer instruction.
This can be done informally by encouraging children to:
. formulate clear questions as objectives for the computer
. work in pairs or groups while using computers;
. "question aloud" (e.g. "What am I looking for here?") while interacting with the programs;
. describe and review what they have learned for five minutes at the end of a computer session.
Without such questioning and monitoring activities, we believe computer usage at home or in school can become "mindless" and will not enhance children's learning significantly. But besides psychological objections to this, there are also important economic arguments to consider (see story below).
We believe the case for investing solely in computer technology, without firstly considering the educational and economic issues involved, cannot be sustained. Any major investment in technology, whether it be for a single family or for the nation's schools, should be subjected to a rigorous cost benefit analysis in an effort to identify demonstrable gains for the investor.
While it is obvious that those involved in the sale of computers would benefit from such in vestments, it is far from clear that children and young people would profit intellectually to an equivalent degree.