Study Shows Handhelds Improve Students' Grades

[Ed Hardy]

A study was recently performed at a high school in South Dakota to see if using PDAs has any effect on student performance. At the end of the school year, the student using PDAs were found to have a noticeably higher GPA.

Read more at http://www.brighthand.com/article/St...Improve_Grades

[Scott R]

Who else upon reading this had the immediate thought of kids using these PDAs to store answers and formulas for their tests? Once BT and/or WiFi becomes more commonplace, they'll also be able to trade answers with their friends or call up answers from the internet. It will be interesting to see how the world adapts.

Scott

[Double-Trinity]

Originally posted by Scott R
Who else upon reading this had the immediate thought of kids using these PDAs to store answers and formulas for their tests? Once BT and/or WiFi becomes more commonplace, they'll also be able to trade answers with their friends or call up answers from the internet. It will be interesting to see how the world adapts.

Scott

My immediate thought is that the kinds of kids geeky enough to bring a pda to school on their own would already have pretty high grades, with or without it.

Also, using them during tests or quizzes seems a little dicey, especially as for a long time a lot of students might be more profiscient than their teachers at using computers and other newer technology, especailly when it comes to potential cheating techniques. I'd stick to traditional tests but use the PDAs or computers during lectures and so on. Also, using them for practice quizzes would be fine as the immediate results, random question pools, and so on would still be useful without cheating concerns.

[Atlantis-Rising]

I dunno about this. I'm in grade 10, and there are three of us in history class with PDAs. I have a 4350, and my buddies have a 2210 and a 1940. I can't see how it's helped in the way that they want it to. We use a bluetooth chat program among ourselves constantly, and the teacher never knows we're trading notes. We use them to watch movies in class, play games, and oh yeah, store formulas and stuff on, as well as using them occasionally as calculators. But as was mentioned on a thread before, the method for cheating is there, and the teachers usually don't know enough about this sort of thing to do anything about it.
for example- I had a physics exam yesterday, and I had forgotten my calculator. so I pulled out my trusty 4350, opened it up to the calculator screen, and showed it to the teacher as she came around. she nodded and moved on. Now, besides the standard calculator app, I have a physics calculator app, and all the formulas, with examples, stored in notes. Had I wanted to, I could have just switched to those. The teacher would never have known the diffrence. So yeah, my GPA would have gone up- but not for the reason they thought. It would have gone up because it was so easy to cheat with.

[Hegemon]

The results of the study are suspicious if you ask me. The main problem is that they didn't control for the Hawthorne Effect: maybe the students who were given PDAs performed well simply because they felt privileged to have snazzy new devices.

[snaggle]

My thought is that there will always be cheating going on. Handing a PDA to a student may enable them to a certain extent, but so would crib notes written on their hands (my favorite method). The Hawthorne effect mentioned is a valid point, but I also would question the content of the instruction.

My job is to develop eLearning curriculum and we run everything through an advisory board of educators and administrators at my school. I simply will not post curriculum that is a regurgitation of facts...all questions, whether they be in quizzes or embedded in the lectures (for discussion topics, etc.) must be designed to be thought-provoking. There needs to be an element of critical thinking where the student can't cheat, they must draw their own conclusions from the materials and debate the topics, or present novel approaches to problem solving. We assume they have the textbook open in their lap...so we require that they think a bit to prove that they have not only learned something, but they have internalized it and thoroughly grok the concept.

That said, of course, this is harder to do in a math course...but that is why we rely on instructors to present real-world scenarios for problem solving, and give out randomized exams. We rely more on collaboration and group projects. In our math classes, we require students to go out and find real-world examples where the math concept is applied...and they need to come back and present it. If the students understand these things from the ground up like this, then hopefully, they won't feel the need to cheat.

Not perfect...but we're getting there.

[Ed Hardy]

Originally posted by Double-Trinity
My immediate thought is that the kinds of kids geeky enough to bring a pda to school on their own would already have pretty high grades, with or without it.

As I said in my article, the participants in this study were randomly selected and were given their handhelds. No students supplied their own.

Originally posted by Double-Trinity
Also, using them during tests or quizzes seems a little dicey, especially as for a long time a lot of students might be more profiscient than their teachers at using computers and other newer technology, especailly when it comes to potential cheating techniques.

The original article on this is contradictory on the subject of using the devices during testing. At one point it says the students were forbidden to use the handhelds during tests, and at another it mentioned using them for taking quizzes. Perhaps some teachers did allow them, and others didn't.

[Scott R]

snaggle, great stuff. I think it's important to add that math/science gets increasingly complex over time. I would imagine that the average 5th grader these days is more advanced than a 12th grader back in the 1800's (just pulling numbers out of the air here). Nowadays, these 5th graders would be allowed to use calculators to handle some of the "menial" tasks which at one time they would have had to spend a good deal of class time doing by hand.

Allowing one to use a handheld computer in class to handle these complex calculations would now allow one to focus on yet higher levels of understanding.

Language, history, etc. will be the areas where cheating becomes an issue. Here, too, though one has to think about what's important for a student to learn. I recall my history class as remembering tons of useless facts and dates, most of which I've long since forgotten. If that's what's to be taught, I think that a student who knows how to pull up the birthdate of any world leader in history in five minutes because they know how to utilize the internet to get at the data quickly is better off than one who has managed to memorize 20% of those dates on their own. History class, as an example, would be more engaging to students (and less prone to cheating) if it spent more time discussing ethical issues of historical events and other aspects that engage the students and make it more interesting.

Scott

[imadrin]

Originally posted by Scott R
I think it's important to add that math/science gets increasingly complex over time. I would imagine that the average 5th grader these days is more advanced than a 12th grader back in the 1800's (just pulling numbers out of the air here).
Scott

A retired school principal I met on an airplane told me that a current 8th grader is required to know the same amount of information as a college freshman from 1950. I didn't really believe him, but I suppose he would know.

As for the discussion in general, I agree that palms are a useful tool for students. As a student, my experiences have been that some teachers, particularly the older ones, don't trust palms or any other sort of electronic devices (including computers), but they learn quickly that my business on my palm is legitimate. The younger teachers, those having exited college recently, don't care at all. The bottom line is that all teachers let me use my palm.

I've never cheated with the device, because if I don't know the answer then it probably isn't in my notes, and there are no open APs in the school. Our school has a rather strict anti-cheating policy and I would really rather not risk my precious NX-70v for a few answers.

I used powerone graph on a geometry test once. I told the teacher that it has the same features as a TI-81, which is probably a bit untrue, but I couldn't figure out how to graph most equations so I can't say that I have used my palm on a test since.

[The Jeebus]

This article is the stupidest, most inconclusive and nonsensical thing I've ever read regarding PDAs. There is no connection made between grades and ownership/usage of a PDA, and little to know information about the study is given. Was everything else with the exception of PDA usage kept constant? Obviously not, since the students were using PDAs in class in ways that the other students weren't, including for taking quizzes. Were those GPA numbers medians, means, or what? What was the standard deviation? What if most kids with PDAs actually performed WORSE than other students, and it was only a select few extremely well performing students that took the PDA average up?

What a useless article.