How Screens Are Taking Over Classrooms

Summary

WSJ Tech News Briefing: How Screens Are Taking Over Classrooms

Release Date: January 23, 2025
Host: Julie Chang
Reporter: Sarah Randazzo
Producer: Julie Chang with Supervising Producer Katherine Milsop

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Introduction

In this episode of WSJ Tech News Briefing, host Julie Chang delves into the escalating presence of screens in American classrooms. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, technology has become an integral part of the educational landscape. Reporter Sarah Randazzo explores the multifaceted impact of this shift on students, teachers, and parents, while examining the broader implications for student learning and educational equity.

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The Shift to Digital Classrooms

The transition from traditional teaching methods to technology-driven classrooms has been a gradual yet significant change. Sarah Randazzo outlines how this evolution has been characterized by the widespread distribution of personal devices to students.

• Evolution of Technology in Schools:

  • “When you and I were in school, maybe we had a computer lab,” Randazzo notes, highlighting the contrast to today's environment where “every student pretty much in America has their own device, whether it's a tablet or a Chromebook” (05:40).

• Prevalence of Screen Time:

  • According to data from Lightspeed Systems, screen time peaks at 2 hours and 24 minutes daily for sixth graders, accounting for 35% of instructional time (06:13).
  • Across grades one through twelve, the average screen time is 98 minutes per day, representing over 20% of the school day (06:18).

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Integration of Technology in Teaching

Teachers are leveraging technology in diverse and innovative ways to enhance the learning experience, albeit with mixed feelings.

• Creative Teaching Methods:

  • In a high school Spanish class, technology orchestrates the entire lesson through interactive slides, quizzes, collaborative activities, and multimedia resources (07:10).
  • Randazzo describes scenarios where “teachers create often essentially a PowerPoint slide where they go from one thing to the next, guided by the tech” (07:10).

• Challenges Faced by Educators:

  • Managing student engagement becomes more complicated with increased screen usage. Teachers report difficulties in preventing distractions such as gaming or unauthorized internet browsing (08:21).
  • “It's basically this constant ebb and flow of managing the students getting too distracted and trying to utilize it for the good and creative uses,” explains Randazzo (08:21).

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Stakeholder Perspectives

Teachers' Views

Teachers exhibit a spectrum of opinions regarding screen usage in classrooms.

• Positive Feedback:

  • Some teachers appreciate the ability to create immersive and interactive lessons, enabling students to explore subjects in ways previously unattainable with traditional methods (08:21).
  • Opportunities for creative assignments, like video projects instead of essays, are seen as advantageous (08:21).

• Negative Feedback:

  • Balancing educational benefits with the temptation for students to become distracted poses a significant challenge (08:21).

Parents' Concerns

Parental attitudes towards increased screen time in education are similarly divided.

• Supportive Sentiments:

  • Approximately 75% of parents acknowledge positive educational impacts, recognizing the benefits of technology in enhancing learning (09:20).

• Apprehensions:

  • Conversely, around 40% of parents express concerns about excessive screen time, fearing potential negative effects on their children's well-being (09:20).
  • Some parents actively seek to reduce their children's screen exposure by advocating for policy changes or opting out of technology use entirely (09:20).

Students' Experiences

Students' responses to increased screen usage in their education reflect a range of experiences.

• Negative Experiences:

  • Reports of “fatigue” and “headaches” from prolonged screen exposure are common, with some students preferring traditional note-taking methods (10:10).

• Positive Experiences:

  • Many students find digital platforms more convenient for submitting assignments and tracking homework, aligning with their familiarity with technology (10:10).

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Impact on Educational Outcomes

The efficacy of increased screen time in classrooms remains a subject of ongoing debate and research.

• Mixed Research Findings:

  • Randazzo references a review of 24 studies which concluded that note-taking by hand can lead to better information retention compared to digital methods (10:38).
  • Criticism is directed at corporate-sponsored research, suggesting potential bias and questioning the validity of claims that technology significantly boosts educational performance (10:38).

• Equity in Education:

  • Technology serves as an equalizer in lower-income districts by providing all students with access to devices, thereby bridging gaps that previously favored higher socioeconomic groups (11:37).

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Conclusions and Future Implications

The incorporation of screens in classrooms presents a complex interplay of benefits and challenges. While technology has democratized access to educational resources and enabled innovative teaching methods, concerns about excessive screen time and its impact on learning efficacy persist. The future of education will likely continue to balance these factors, striving to harness the advantages of technology while mitigating its drawbacks.

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Notable Quotes

• Sarah Randazzo on Classroom Technology Integration:

  • “Teachers can bring students into other worlds in ways that they couldn't before.” (07:10)

• Sarah Randazzo on Parents' Mixed Reactions:

  • “In one survey, about three in four parents said that computer use was having a positive effect on their child's learning. But in another survey, 40% of parents said kids spend too much time on screens.” (09:20)

• Sarah Randazzo on Educational Equity:

  • “Devices are really a great equalizer. Families who couldn't afford to buy devices on their own now really are benefiting.” (11:37)

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Final Remarks

Julie Chang wraps up the episode by acknowledging the intricate dynamics at play as technology becomes increasingly embedded in educational settings. The dialogue highlights the necessity for ongoing evaluation and thoughtful implementation to ensure that the integration of screens in classrooms serves to enhance, rather than hinder, student learning and development.

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Timestamp Reference:

• Times in brackets (e.g., 05:40) correspond to the minutes and seconds in the transcript for easy navigation to specific segments.

Transcript

[Julie Chang]

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Foreign welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Thursday, January 23rd. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. Could artificial intelligence learn to speak financial jargon? Compliance companies say they've cracked the code and are using the tech to fight insider trading and other financial crimes. Plus, screens are becoming a bigger part of the school day in classrooms across the country, accelerated by the COVID pandemic. But has more tech in classes benefited learning? We'll dive into that. But first, catching insider trading tends to be challenging because of all the financial jargon used by Wall street traders. Now companies that make compliance software are pitching generative AI to firms, saying the tools could help combat financial crime. Risk and compliance Journal reporter Richard Vanderford has been looking into this, and he joins me now. Richard, what problem are AI compliance software companies looking to address here?

[Richard Vanderford]

Banks and other kinds of financial institutions create a large amount of communications data, obviously, because they have thousands of employees, and the compliance staff have to sift through that to see if there's any evidence of market manipulation or insider trading or any other kind of financial crime. And in the past, this had been done by frontline staff using pretty rudimentary computer tools looking for maybe a word like insider trading, if someone would say that and then someone manually reviews it. And the promise of AI in this context is that it could simplify and maybe automate some of this work and also potentially make it so that the bank or other institution doesn't have to hire as many compliance staff going forward.

[Julie Chang]

What are some of the jargon or code words that traders use?

[Richard Vanderford]

There's one example I was given. Someone would say something like, let's throw some chum in the water, and that's a reference to spoofing. But a traditional system wouldn't catch it because there's no word in there that indicates like a crime could be occurring. Chum is not something you would want to flag because you'd have way too many false positives. But an AI system might be able to catch this and say this looks like spoofing, or it could be spoofing the Systems can also potentially catch emojis being used or other ways to use code language. As the technology to screen these communications has gotten better, duplicitous traders have gotten more sophisticated about saying things in code, maybe just responding with an emoji. And it would be very hard to catch with a traditional compliance system. But an AI powered system could potentially say, oh, that I think they're actually talking about something suspicious or that indicates a potential financial crime.

[Julie Chang]

Are there any downsides or risks to using these AI tools?

[Richard Vanderford]

Yes, there are some. The regulators in general in the United States and Europe are really cautious about using AI. A big risk that has come up in lots of different AI contexts is bias that you might inadvertently train an AI on data that incorporates some kind of bias, whether it's like a racial bias or gender bias or any other kind of bias. And now you're using it to automate a process. So it's replicating that bias at scale. That's something regulators really worry about in any kind of context. Not just finance. Regulators also want to know how it works. So there's a principle called explainability where the firms using it have to be confident they can explain how the model produced the results it produced. It can't just be like a black box and oh, we trust it because it's always worked in the past.

[Julie Chang]

That was risk and compliance Journal reporter Richard Vande Ford. Coming up, the pandemic led to more tech in classrooms. But while we're past the pandemic, the tech stayed. What that means for student learning, that's after the break.

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Class time has become screen time in schools across the country. Use of tech in classes was already growing when it was accelerated by the COVID pandemic. Students were sent home and classrooms went online. WSJ education reporter Sarah Randazzo has been covering the rapid tech transformation playing out in American schools. She says the shift has happened with little debate, conflicting research, and high stakes for the nation's children. Sarah, can you put into context what the shift to more tech in schools looks like?

[Sarah Randazzo]

Yeah. So this has really been a years long progression. You know, when you And I were in school, maybe we had a computer lab, maybe there were some computers in the classroom, but really most things were rooted in paper, pencil, maybe some smart boards. Basic technology these days, especially post Covid, every student pretty much in America has their own device, whether it's a tablet or a Chromebook. Sometimes they take those back and forth with them, sometimes they sit in the classroom and they have another set at home. But really the shift has become that doing things on the screen is more of a default than the paper and pencil method we grew up with.

[Julie Chang]

Do we know on average how much time students are spending on screens every day?

[Sarah Randazzo]

Yes. So we had a company called Lightspeed Systems analyze tons of data that they have on the use of school issued devices that students have. And so they found that the time spent on devices peaks at two hours and 24 minutes daily in sixth grade. And at first you might think, okay, two and a half hours, the day is long. But that's about 35% of instructional time that we found. So really about a third of a student's day in sixth grade is on a device. And I went up and down based on the grade and it's showing more and more of the school day is being used on screens. Overall in the lightspeed analysis, they found that from grades one through 12, students are spending an average of 98 minutes on school issued devices. And that's about 20% or more of the average instructional time in the school day.

[Julie Chang]

How are teachers integrating technology into their classrooms and lessons other than, you know, the obvious ways of having students submit their work on laptops?

[Sarah Randazzo]

Yeah, so I've been visiting a lot of classrooms this school year, and it's pretty remarkable the ways the technology can get woven into the day. I was in a high school Spanish class, for instance, where the entire day was guided by what was on the screen. And so basically, teachers create oftentimes essentially a PowerPoint slide where they go from one thing to the next, guided by the tech. And so one slide will say, okay, we're going to do a vocab quiz. And so the students will do a quiz. The next slide will say, okay, now everyone type in in Spanish what you did this summer. And then it'll get shared with everyone else in the class. And then the next slide will be a video that they pull up showing Spanish being spoken in another country to give a worldview. And then the next thing they switch to will be a game that the students then play. And so there's really just a zillion apps that teachers are Sorting through these days, for better or worse, some are getting a little overwhelmed, but they can incorporate it in everything from writing exercises to tests, to giving essay feedback to doing group work. Really, almost every part of the school day you could imagine have a tech component.

[Julie Chang]

And there are many stakeholders in this conversation, but I want to hone in on three of them. Teachers, parents, students, one by one. Let's start with teachers. What have they said about the use of screens in schools?

[Sarah Randazzo]

Teachers are definitely mixed. They're the ones who are bearing the brunt of figuring out how to incorporate the technology. They do get some guidance from on high, but really it's each teacher in their classroom trying to figure it out. And so for some, they say it's really revolutionized things because they can bring students into other worlds in ways that they couldn't before. They can literally have students diving around on a map and just learning more about other things that just weren't as possible in a textbook and can do really creative things. Students can be more visual, create a video instead of writing an essay, that kind of thing. But at the same time, teachers say managing all this is difficult. As you and I know, when you have something in front of you, you're looking at it, you're texting, you're trying to sneak in, checking your email, playing a game. It's the same with students. When they have the Chromebooks up, they can just go on the Internet. And so it's essentially this constant ebb and flow of managing the students getting too distracted with it and then trying to utilize it for the good and creative uses that are possible with it.

[Julie Chang]

And what have parents said?

[Sarah Randazzo]

Yeah, parents are also like everything, a bit mixed. We spoke to some parents who were really pushing back and trying to opt their students out of tech altogether or get their districts to change policies. So one woman I spoke to really worked closely with her district in Oregon and presented a plan to them and said, here's some things we could do to scale back. They took some, suggest suggestions, didn't take others. Overall, we've seen some surveys where parents say they're okay with the use of tech, but then also have issues with the amount of screen time. In one survey, for instance, that we looked, at, about three in four parents said that computer use was having a positive effect on their child's learning. But in another survey, 40% of parents said kids spend too much time on screens. So again, they're seeing some benefits. But then just cumulatively, it's suddenly like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is now a lot of Screen time happening.

[Julie Chang]

How about the students? What have they said about the use of screens?

[Sarah Randazzo]

Yeah, so we spoke to students across the country in different places, and some of them said, this is getting to be a little too much. I get fatigue. I get headaches from looking at the screen so much. You know, my eyes get tired. I'd rather just take notes with paper. Others told us, hey, it's easier to turn in assignments. It's easier to keep track of homework. We're on technology all the time anyway, so it makes sense that it's being used in schools.

[Julie Chang]

Sarah, what does the research say on the use of screens in classrooms?

[Sarah Randazzo]

Yeah, there's not a ton out there right now that shows technology boosts kids education. The research is pretty mixed and I'd say remains unsettled. For instance, one review we looked at of 24 studies looked at whether college students retain more information when they take notes by hand versus on a computer. And they found that the note taking by hand won out. That's one very specific use of tech versus paper. The companies selling these products, you know, there's zillions of them, they put out research that they say shows, oh, use our product and your kids will score this much better on tests. But when we dive into that research, a lot of it is a little shaky, and a lot of it is sponsored by the companies putting it out. So it's a little biased in that sense that a company is commissioning its own research to try to prove its product works. And so a lot of the research is that just because academic researchers have a lot to focus on and they just haven't done as much on this as the companies themselves.

[Julie Chang]

Where have screens in classrooms been the most helpful?

[Sarah Randazzo]

There's a lot of places where they're helpful, certainly especially in lower income districts. Schools are saying that these are really a great equalizer. Families who couldn't afford to buy devices on their own now really are benefiting from money that schools have to give devices to students. And so in that sense, it's really helped pretty much every student in America have access to technology, whereas maybe before it would have leaned more toward higher socioeconomic classes.

[Julie Chang]

That was WSJ education reporter Sarah Randazzo. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by me, Julie Chang with supervising producer Katherine Milsop. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.