A new study casts doubt on the assertion that raising computer ownership rates among low-income families could go some way towards closing the poor-rich academic achievement gap, TechCrunch reports. The findings are based on a randomized trial in California where researchers tracked outcomes after giving out free computers to students around the state.

Authors Robert W. Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson noted that having a computer at home did have an impact on ownership rates and usage time, but didn’t translate to actual improvement in student achievement. Computer ownership didn’t have an impact on any of the standard measures used to gauge achievement, including grades, standardized test scores, attendance, or credits earned.

Based on the (reasonable) fear that lack of computer access was hurting poor students, California gave out computers to 1,123 students in grades 6-10 attending 15 schools across the diverse central California area. Most importantly, the data-savvy administrators randomly selected half the students as participants, so that we wouldn’t have to worry about whether those who took up the offer were unusually motivated.

True to their worries, 49 percent of the children didn’t even know how to download a file from the Internet. Naturally, computer use went up, but so did their access to less-than-educational games. “We find that home computers increase total use of computers for schoolwork, but also increase total use of computers for games, social networking and other entertainment, which might offset each other,” surmise the researchers.

Gregory Ferenstein sees both good news and bad in the study results. The good news is that lack of a computer will not present as insurmountable an obstacle to student success as has been previously assumed. The bad news is that giving out free computers seemed like the most straight-forward solution to the achievement gap between poor students and their better-off peers and now it’s been proven to have no measurable impact at all.

Of course, having computers may have non-educational benefits. Basic computer literacy certainly helps in a knowledge economy. But the real problem is that many poor kids never even get a shot at information technology jobs, and the rich-poor gap is only getting worse. The SAT gap has grown40 percent and college completion has skyrocketed 50 percent since the 1980s.

Now what? Well, as Ferenstein explains, this means that those working to close the gap will have to go back to the drawing board and figure out ways to mitigate problems that are much messier than lack of computers: the students’ social and family environment.

The post Study: Computer Ownership Doesn’t Mitigate Income Achievement Gap appeared first on Education News.

Sometimes the pace of change can take everyone by surprise. For decades, people in the sciences complained about the high cost of access to published academic material, yet for-profit publishing companies continued to serve as gatekeepers thanks in part to distinct lack of enthusiasm on the part of universities and governments to implement a new system. But in the past 5 years, the dam seemed to have broken with countries around the world adopting policies to make tax-funded research more cheaply and easily accessible.

The Economist is reporting that the Research Council UK is the latest to take a step in this direction by adopting new rules on access to publicly funded research. From now on, any journals that publish the results of such research will have to make it available online for free within a year of the original publication date.

The new rules come on the heels of a similar move in Feburary by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy which directed federal agencies to adopt a similar set of rules for any scientific research they fund in February.

A week before that, a bill which would require free access to government-financed research after six months had begun to wend its way through Congress. The European Union is moving in the same direction. So are charities. And SCOAP3, a consortium of particle-physics laboratories, libraries and funding agencies, is pressing all 12 of the field’s leading journals to make the 7,000 articles they publish each year free to read. For scientific publishers, it seems, the party may soon be over.

Although this push for broader and cheaper access has strong support among academics, the companies that have for years profited from academic publishing are not nearly as enthusiastic. Maintaining research archives and charging individual users and institutions for access has been an immense moneymaker. According to The Economist, one of the largest academic publishers – the Dutch firm Elsevier – boasts a profit margin of nearly 40%. Springer, based in Germany, reports a similarly high 36% margin on sales of $1.1 billion.

Still, turning back the tide is apparently not an option, so companies are instead hoping to get ahead of the curve by setting up open-source subsidiaries of their own.

In the past year Elsevier has more than doubled the number of open-access journals it publishes, to 39. And even in those that usually charge readers (such as Cell and the Lancet), paying a publication fee makes a paper available free immediately.

Outsell, a Californian consultancy, estimates that open-access journals generated $172m in 2012. That was just 2.8% of the total revenue journals brought their publishers (some $6 billion a year), but it was up by 34% from 2011 and is expected to reach $336m in 2015. The number of open-access papers is forecast to grow from 194,000 (out of a total of 1.7m publications) to 352,000 in the same period.

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A study shows that reading and math skills at age seven can predict how much money an adult will make, reports Lindsay Abrams at The Atlantic.

This surprising discovery was even unexpected by one of the lead researchers Stuart Ritchie, reports Rebecca Klein at the Huffington Post:

 “A lot of psychologists — including us before we did the study! — would have guessed that, since general intelligence is so important, specific skills like reading and math wouldn’t have any extra effects on SES beyond it,” Ritchie wrote. “But we found that these effects do exist — so no matter how smart people were … being better at reading and math at age seven was still significantly linked to SES aged 42.”

The study was lead by Stuart Ritchie and Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh. They wanted to what degree academic skill played into the overall equation for a successful life.

They looked at different measures of success at various points in the lives of over 17,000 residents of England, Scotland and Wales who were followed for 50 years after their birth. The measures focused on five different points in the participants lives. The first was socioeconomic class at birth, and researchers looked at the parent’s occupation and whether they owned or rented a home and what size it was.

The second measure was reading and math skills at age seven and how interested students seemed to be in learning subjects. The third measure was intelligence at age eleven and participants’ IQ scores. The fourth was academic motivation at age sixteen — specifically, they looked at how strongly participants agreed with statements such as “School is a waste of time”.

Finally the researchers looked at the students’ adult socioeconomic status at age 42. This included occupation, income and homeowner status.

The results showed that how much money people made at midlife was predicted by math skills at age seven, with a grade level boost in reading corresponded with a salary $7,750 higher at age 42.

Early reading ability proved to also be an indicator, but only girls. The good news is that according to Bates:

 “Math and reading are two of the most intervention-friendly of topics: Practice improves nearly all children.”

The study, titled “Enduring Links From Childhood Mathematics and Reading Achievement to Adult Socioeconomic Status,” is available in Psychological Science via SAGE Journals.

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The foundation of the school choice movement is a desire to empower parents with the ability to send their children to a high-quality school regardless of where the family lives. School choice advocates frequently charge that one’s zip code shouldn’t determine the quality of one’s education — as wealthy neighborhoods tend to have good schools and poorer neighborhoods do not — and that opening up great schools to all is democratic, egalitarian and will help drive education reform.

But critics of school choice argue that this leaves poorer and predominantly minority students left back in traditional public schools as families who put a premium on education flee using choice — and that those families who take their children out of public schools move them into less diverse schools.

Matthew Chingos of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy has concluded that data shows it is unlikely that a relationship exists between school choice and segregation.

By comparing changes in charter enrollment with changes in minority students’ exposure to non-minority students using information from the Common Core of Data, Chingos found that there’s no significant relationship. He didn’t stop there:

I also used an alternative measure of segregation called a “dissimilarity index” and obtained similar findings: no consistent relationship between changes in charter enrollment and changes in segregation. Finally, I conducted a more sophisticated panel data analysis that uses all nine years of data to estimate the relationship between charter enrollment and segregation using only the changes within counties over time^. Once again, using both the exposure and dissimilarity indices, the results consistently indicated no meaningful relationship between choice and segregation.

Critics may not be completely satisfied, and Chingos recognizes that it’s still possible that school choice and segregation are related — but that it’s very unlikely:

The lack of any consistent relationship between charter enrollment and segregation does not eliminate the possibility that such a relationship exists, but suggests that it is unlikely. For there to be a relationship, it would have to be the case that counties where charter enrollment increased experienced an increase in segregation as a result but then adopted policies (or experienced other changes) that counteracted the increase in segregation. In my view, that is not a very plausible explanation for these results.

The growth of charter schools and school choice has been consistent over the last 15 years, with ~1% of students enrolled in charters in 2000 and more than 3% by 2010. Arizona — and cities such as Washington, DC and New Orleans — has been aggressive in promoting school choice, with Florida, Ohio, Georgia, Illinois and others making up a total of 17 states with school choice programs.

The post Does School Choice Increase Segregation? No, Says Brookings appeared first on Education News.

by Julia Steiny

Three years ago, prior to enrolling her son in the middle school, Phyllis Penhallow often had reason to be at the school just as lunch was over.

“I’d pull up, park, and the doors to the cafeteria would open.  Teaching assistants herded the kids out to some grass.  There was no real equipment, just a bin with 2 wiffle balls, no bats; 3 rubber balls, two deflated, no pump.  The kids stood there for about 7 minutes and then got herded back in.  I imagined herding cows out to graze.  Except that they couldn’t graze.  They stood.  I noticed the kids looked kind of sad, uninvolved, and not wanting to be there.”

Julia Steiny

And that, my friends, was those kids’ recess.

No running, whooping, cartwheels (it was grass), 4-square, tag, or card games.  No double-dutch jump rope, kids sharing the latest dance moves, or showoffs doing whatever solo physical feat it is they do best.  No explosion of pent-up energy.

Even worse, there was little visible socializing.  Research argues that a key feature of recess breaks — K-12 — is for kids to learn how to interact with one another directly, with adults only hovering supportively in the background.

And if all this seems like something kids can do outside of school time, read the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) passionate advocacy piece, The Critical Role of Recess in Schools.  Please note the word “critical.”  Breaks should take place at school — K-12.

During May is Mental Health Month, be aware that pediatricians believe recess should be treated with serious respect — or academics, physical, social, and mental health will suffer.

As it happens, Penhallow is a lecturer at the University of Rhode Island in the Human Development and Family Studies Department.  A specialist in early childhood, she consults with the State’s Department of Ed on early-learning standards.  She’s teaches about how children develop in happy, healthy, high-performance ways.  And she knows that national studies say recess is dying.  The time is being cut or eliminated and reallocated to academics.  Even where there is recess, obsessive-compulsive safety policies forbid running run around or doing anything deem remotely risky.  So the practices at Penhallow’s school, Chariho Middle School, merely reflect current thinking, however unfun.

But change was imperative.  So Penhallow started talking to other parents who, not surprisingly, knew little of the research on the subject.  But some — probably those with the super-wriggly boys — felt the kids should be more physical.

Everyone agrees that pre-school kids need to be very active, running, tumbling, making stuff.  But then they go to kindergarten and first grade and sit.  Teachers move and talk, but kids sit.  Yes, they get gym — often as little as schools can legally get away with.  But the AAP argues that structured sports and gym time is still very adult driven, serving its own instructional purpose.  Gym is no substitute for real recess with opportunities for kid-driven choices about what to do with each other, in, as Penhallow puts it, “adult-free space.”

Penhallow and her parent colleagues admit that, out of frustration, they were too aggressive in how they tried to make changes.  “You have to hear about the school’s obstacles, their structure, time in the day.”  (Always good advice, Parents.)  But eventually, the recess advocates won sympathy from the school’s administration and Chariho’s Superintendent.  The district lengthened the time a bit, and parents helped fill the bins with items for quick sports like badminton.

But the District’s most innovative move was to hire the Boston group, Playworkers, to train adults in supporting unstructured time.  Playworkers’ motto is:  “Make Recess Count.”  Their site has many relevant research studies and testimonials from happy principals, mostly from low-income schools where recess has all but died out as a casualty of testing mania.  Those principals adore how a rich recess experience improved discipline, liberating clear-headed time for academics.  Investing in adults who supervise recess gives kids’ free-time world a bit of structure and much more support.  Staying out of kids’ business and intervening only when asked or it’s necessary is a skill, like any.  And playing is essential — for all of us.

The efforts worked.  Kids report that recess is way more fun — not perfect yet, but a real break.

Obesity is epidemic, but we won’t let kids run around.  Violence, low graduations rates and a high proportion of disaffected youth are alarming, but schools rarely think about supporting kids’ mental health.  Skills for healthy conflict resolution seem to be at an all-time low — witness Congress — but kids have no time for supported social life.  Recess isn’t just rejuvenating, fun and relaxing.  It’s instructive in its own right.

At a panel discussing recess — where I met Penhallow — a pediatrician in the audience, Dr. William Hollinshead, suggested that parents ask their doctors to write prescriptions for recess.  Perhaps the schools will listen to doctors.

Because too few others are concerned that eliminating recess is making kids fat, school-hating and nuts.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at GoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street.

The post Julia Steiny: School Recess Is Good For Kids’ Mental Health appeared first on Education News.

Student demographics at private schools and traditional public schools are different, but after controlling for variables — income, race, gender, parent involvement — William Jeynes found that private school students performed 7 months ahead of public students.

Ron Matus of redefinED points out that this research could have a tremendous impact on how the growing school choice movement views itself. By focusing on charter schools, which are funded like public schools but have autonomy over their management, curriculum and overall operation, Jeynes says that school choice advocates could be ignoring an effective model:

“It really seems in terms of school choice that this nation has decided to throw all kinds of resources at developing charter schools but has really overlooked the broader approach to school choice,” Jeynes said in a phone interview. “We really ought to include private schools.”

The reasons for private school success seem to derive from the schools’ culture. First, a belief in seriousness of purpose and self-worth seem to drive private school students in a unique way — as Jeynes puts it, they think that “God doesn’t make junk.”

“You can’t say, “God doesn’t make junk” in a public school,” he said. “There’s something about that. It’s not just saying, ‘You can do it.’ It’s that ‘Hey, you have a creator who made you, and he made you well, so you can do this.’”

And there is a marked difference in a sense of belonging and caring in a private school, which Jeynes cautiously summarizes as “love.” In short, private school students tend to believe that teachers and the school care about their lives and academic outcomes. That bears fruit on academic performance, as students thrive in such a welcoming, comfortable atmosphere compared to a less-personal traditional public school model.

The research doesn’t condemn public schools as soulless factories of pain and disinterest, but it does identify and contrast two general models that can be very different.

Some charter and public schools have adopted bits of the culture and environment that have proved effective in private, faith-based schools, but there continues to be resistance to learn from religious institutions. Jeynes thinks this is a shame:

“If there is a certain group of schools that is reaching inner city kids and doing a better job at it, we should rejoice at it, no matter our religious affiliation,” he said.

The post Study: Private, Faith-Based School Students a Year Ahead appeared first on Education News.

When doling out financial aid, schools are increasingly bypassing low-income students in favor of their peers from wealthier families by offering merit-based rather than need-based grants, claims a new report from The New America Foundation based on data released by the U.S. Department of Education.

TNAF reports that in order to boost their position in the prestigious US News & World Report college rankings, schools are increasingly offering financial aid in the form of merit scholarships for high-achieving students. Applicants from low-income families tend to be underrepresented in that group.

According to NBC News, merit-based aid doesn’t take into account the applicants’ financial need. So to make themselves more attractive high-achievers – who tend to be wealthier than an average student – schools prefer, for example, to offer 4 $5,000 student grants based on academic performance rather than one $20,000 grant based on income.

While the federal government issues guidelines on distribution of its grants, it doesn’t regulate aid from an institution’s coffers. Colleges have fiercely fought efforts by lawmakers to force greater transparency in financial aid practices. Colleges, many under tighter budgets as they offer more amenities and hire the best professors, are under pressure to raise revenues and are using tuition prices to do so.

At the same time the cost of attending a four-year college has gone up substantially, with four-year public universities reporting a 5.2% increase in tuition every year for the past ten years. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tuition increases are significantly outpacing inflation.

This is considered one of the chief contributors to the student loan debt crisis, with the total amount carried by college students and graduates hitting $1 trillion this year.

The New America Foundation analyzed net price data — the amount students paid after all grant aid was exhausted — to conclude that hundreds of colleges expect the neediest students to pay an amount equal to or even greater than their families’ yearly earnings. For instance, of the 479 private, nonprofit colleges examined, 89 percent charged students with family incomes of $30,000 or less more than $10,000 in net prices and 22 percent expected students to pay about $20,000 or more each year. Needy students then rely more heavily on student loans, either drop out or take on full-time jobs, which diminishes their chances of completing school, the study said.

Stephen Burd, the foundation’s education policy analyst, worries that this approach to aid by the schools could lead to more social stratification in higher education in general and more serious problems with some schools in particular. Although merit aid is mainly favored by private colleges, according to the study, there’s a trend of public colleges increasingly focusing on merit aid as they struggle to balance their budgets in the face of continuing state budget cuts.

The post Merit Financial Aid Favors Wealthier Students, Report Finds appeared first on Education News.

Stephanie Owen and Isabel V. Sawhill attempt to answer a deceptively simple question in the latest paper for the Brookings Institution: is college a good path for all American high school graduates? Owen and Sawhill – who is the co-director of the Brookings’ Center on Children and Families, Budgeting for National Priories and a Senior Fellow on Economic Studies — try to determine if the return on investment in a college degree still warrants the expense, the risk and the time in every circumstance.

Owen and Sawhill write that the most straightforward way to perform a cost/benefit analysis on a college degree would be to look at the earning gains made by students for every additional year they invest in their education. Yet using such a direct approach has downsides. Success is not guaranteed and students who are more motivated and driven are both more likely to attend college and are more likely to succeed in their post-graduation careers.

Researchers have attempted to get around this problem of causality by employing a number of clever techniques, including, for example, comparing identical twins with different levels of education. The best studies suggest that the return to an additional year of school is around 10 percent. If we apply this 10 percent rate to the median earnings of about $30,000 for a 25- to 34-year-old high school graduate working full time in 2010, this implies that a year of college increases earnings by $3,000, and four years increases them by $12,000. Notice that this amount is less than the raw differences in earnings between high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders of $15,000, but it is in the same ballpark.

There’s also the complication that not all college degrees are created equal. Although on average, college graduates substantially outearn peers with only a high school degree, the earning advantage varies substantially based on the major, the school granting the degree, and the post-graduation career.

That doesn’t even take into account the fact that those who attend college without graduating will see this advantage eroded substantially, especially when factoring in their student debt load.

While the average return to obtaining a college degree is clearly positive, we emphasize that it is not universally so. For certain schools, majors, occupations, and individuals, college may not be a smart investment. By telling all young people that they should go to college no matter what, we are actually doing some of them a disservice.

The post Brookings: College Degrees Aren’t a Foolproof Investment appeared first on Education News.

by Julia Steiny

When a character flaw appears in ourselves or others, our instinct is to blame Mom.  I know that’s my own boys’ working theory.  But, as it turns out, hard science is on their side.

Researchers who work with lab rats have long known that some rats are cooperative and social while others are nasty and aggressive.  And everything in between, like humans.  So certain researchers have been investigating the origins of these differences in social character.

Julia Steiny

You got it:  Mom.

When rat babies are born, their mothers lick them in a mammalian bonding gesture like human cuddling and caressing.  Some go at it truly, madly, deeply.  Others, more indifferent, lick their offspring with varying degrees of enthusiasm.  As the babies get older, they start venturing away from Mom to seek adventures of their own.  Even good rat moms don’t hover, prevent them from taking risks, adjudicate their kids’ fights, or do their homework, so to speak.  But when the little rat does run into trouble — with a predator, a fall or a fight — they return for a good dose of licking.  The licking lowers their stress level, assures them someone’s there for them, and rebuilds the confidence they need to get back out and cope with reality.

Well-licked rat babies grow up pleasantly-socialized, curious, and fun to be around.  Oh and btw, they live longer.  Poorly-parented rats become high-strung, fearful, aggressive, and at worst, full-on violent.

I first heard of these experiments years ago at a lecture by Richard Tremblay, a research psychologist from the University of Montreal.  He studied the origin of aggression which, he argued, could be greatly reduced with affectionate parenting.

With a charming French accent and naughty pleasure, Tremblay often repeated the word “lick.”  As George Orwell’s book 1984 exploited so well, rats hold an especially dark, yucky place in our imaginations.  So, at Tremblay’s lecture, even super-open-minded Brown University folks were squirming with a lot of “eeuuu!”

Still, there it is:  nurture affects nature.  Or, as the biologists put it, epigenetic events strongly affect how your genes are expressed.  Your DNA is what makes you you.  But your Mom can make you way better.  (Actually, I already knew that.)

More recently, RadioLab produced a terrific interview with researchers Michael Meaney, from McGill, and Frances Champagne, from Columbia, who’d also researched the effects of good and bad rat parenting.  Their technique was to switch the rat babies of affectionate moms and indifferent ones.

Like most of us, rat moms parent much as they were parented.  So the ones who got a lot of affection, tend to give affection generously, thereby reproducing a bloodline of pleasant rats with affectionate DNA.  Similarly, aggressive DNA is passed on by indifferent rat moms.

Yes, humans can make rational choices about such things, but surely you know people who complain bitterly about how they were parented, and then turn to their own kids and neglect, constrict or criticize them in exactly the same ways.  Parenting styles are largely inherited.

The researchers found that when affectionate moms licked and cared for babies born of indifferent mothers, those babies became more trusting and social than would have been their genetically-determined path.  If DNA is genetic software, the epigenetic environment can alter the code.  The good-mom’s loving tongue licking the aggressive mom’s baby lets the genes “express” themselves, as the scientists say, in a river of neuronal bio-chemistry that produces pleasure, reassurance and calm.  The born-nervous baby calms down, fears less and trusts that she will be comforted if she falls down and goes boom.  The researchers’ switcheroo reprogrammed a baby’s aggressive DNA inheritance, allowing her to be a good parent herself some day.  (And vice versa.)

Assuming rats have something to teach us about ourselves, which I do, we have three take-aways.  First, moms need to know that affectionate nuzzling is far more likely to send their kids to Stanford than Einstein videos or toddler academic tutoring (which totally exists, if you didn’t know).  Second, that humans can change their behavior if they so choose.  Reluctant moms who are indisposed towards goofy baby-play need to get over it.  Seriously.  They need to suck it up and learn to lick their little rat.  Third, and perhaps most important, if a kid isn’t getting their cortisol level reduced by a generously-licking mom, the extended family or community absolutely must find someone to step in.  Otherwise aggression or other mental-health issues will follow.

And when that happens, once again, folks will point fingers and, that’s right, blame Mom.

So, on the occasion of May is Mental Health Month — and especially on Mother’s Day — let us heartily commend those profoundly affectionate moms, who don’t hover, but do console.  Because above all, we need a nation of well-licked rats.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at GoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street.

The post Julia Steiny: Thank Good Mothers for Licking Their Little Rats appeared first on Education News.

A growing number of parents feel that schools are not taking advantage of an exceptional opportunity when they decline to make use of mobile devices sported by a growing number of students in classes.

A new report published by Grunwald Associates and the Learning First Alliance finds that nearly one in four K-12 students uses some kind of mobile digital device at least occasionally, and many parents feel that the technology could be key to breaching the digital divide that threatens to separate low-income students from the higher-income peers when it comes to educational opportunities.

The report shows that there’s less of a link between family income and use of devices like smartphones than researchers expected. Although kids from low-income families were less likely to have access to or use such devices, nearly 20% of students who did not use them came from families where parents were users.

The cause of non-use in those cases is “some other reason that probably revolves around the attitudes of parents and, by extension, the students toward the smartphone,” said Peter Grunwald, the president and founder of Grunwald Associates, a research firm based in Bethesda, Md., known for its work on ed-tech related projects. “The ubiquity of mobile technology in everyday life I think comes through loud and clear in this study. Families own multiple devices, even families that are not well off.”

The number of available devices at home was found to be strongly linked with income. Homes where family income was under $25,000 owned on average 3.3 mobile digital gadgets while households with annual income of $150,000 or more had nearly twice as many.

In terms of support, a majority of responding parents saying they believed mobile devices could be positive educational tools for their children. “Majorities of parents believe that mobile devices and applications offer fun, engaging ways of learning, connecting and communicating,” the report states. “When it comes to mobile devices and education, most parents believe that these devices open up learning opportunities, benefit students’ learning and can engage students in the classroom. Many parents also believe that mobiles and apps teach academic skills and content.”

Parents appeared to be ahead of their school districts when it came to supporting to the use tools like smartphones, tablets and laptops in their schools. Although parents of students attending schools where such devices were used were more likely to embrace their use for educational purposes, support levels among parents were on average higher than among school district officials, teachers and other school employees.

Parents of students in grades K-2 were more likely to vouch for the effectiveness of mobile education than parents of students in grades 3-12. Although the study did not directly explore the reasons why parents of younger students showed that response, Grunwald said the discrepancy goes beyond parents of younger children simply being younger themselves, and thus more tech savvy.

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