Neuroscientist and former teacher Jared Cooney Horvath is calling for a reduction in the use of screens and digital tools in schools. He believes educational technology is undermining how children learn and develop. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
In his book "The Digital Delusion," Horvath writes: "This might be one of the hardest truths our generation has to face." He argues that children's cognitive abilities are declining: "Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. For nearly two centuries, the west experienced steady generational progress. Each new cohort of children grew up, on average, healthier, happier, and better educated than the last. Until now."
Starting around the year 2000, something changed. "Across the west, IQ scores began to fall – even as time spent in school kept rising," writes Horvath. Scores in international tests started to drop. The reason, he says, lies in the meteoric rise of educational technology.
According to a recent Department for Education report, the UK educational technology market generates an annual turnover of about £6.5bn. In the US, Horvath says it is a $400bn mega-industry, woven into every aspect of schooling.
Horvath notes that the uptake of laptops in schools, especially in the US, began in earnest in 2010-12. "It's when Covid hit, that's when every school had to pivot digital as a Band-Aid ... rightly so. But when Covid finished you would assume they'd rip that Band-Aid off, but the vast majority of schools didn't. They just stayed digital," he said. In the US, 88% of school districts now have one-to-one computers.
Horvath has been studying how people learn for over 15 years and has concluded that "tech is not a very good tool for it." He cites recent scores from the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa). In 2012, 2015 and 2018, Pisa asked students how much time they spent using digital devices during a typical school day. "The more time students spent on screens at school, the further their scores fell," Horvath said. "On average, those who used computers for more than six hours per day scored 66 points lower than their peers who didn't use them at all."
However, others in the field warn against confusing correlation with causation. Rose Luckin, emerita professor at the UCL Knowledge Lab in London, said: "[Horvath] does get certain things right. It's true that a great deal of educational technology was sold on promises rather than proof. But that does not mean that all educational technology is problematic." She notes that according to Pisa data, moderate school device use is associated with better results than no use.
Daisy Christodoulou, director of education at No More Marking, agrees that society has been "a bit blase" about the impact of new technologies, but she is more optimistic about the potential of technology and AI in upper secondary. Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor of educational assessment at the UCL Institute of Education, said: "Technology may well be harming student achievement but the correlational studies that we currently have cannot support such causal claims. The question we need to be asking is, 'when does edtech help learning?'"