| Jennifer DeBoer
Vanderbilt University
Technology on trial: can computers effectively increase the achievement of traditionally under-served populations?
Computers today are widely accepted as a learning tool, but their instructional utility is debatable and appears to be highly context-dependent. They are seen as having major potential for supporting education in developing countries and in low-income settings in rich countries. I use information from PISA 2003 to model the relationship between independent and school-based computer use and problem-solving skills for low-income students in a diverse sample of nations. The questions I seek to answer are: how is computer use related to academic achievement? Is this relationship similar across use environments? Is this relationship similar in different national contexts? I address selection issues inherent in this cross-sectional dataset by matching students on family and household resource characteristics to move closer to measuring the causal effect of computer use and achievement. I use propensity score matching to isolate the relationship of the treatment (computer use) holding other factors constant. I run these analyses individually for the US, Canada, Korea, Uruguay, and Thailand; I also run a semi-pooled model. I separate the three treatments available--computer use in school, at home, and elsewhere--by running the analysis for each. Further, I test the persistence of the effects I find by running analogous models on the four countries that continue to participate in the ICT Questionnaire in PISA 2009. For the United States, I incorporate comparable data from the base year of the new High School Longitudinal Study: 2009. By exploiting novel estimation techniques and rich datasets, I illuminate a pressing policy issue.
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