Beyond the "Digital Divide":

Paul Attewell Gets the Facts about Kids and Computers

Beginning in the late 1990s, the "digital divide" became a buzzword among politicians, educators, and philanthropists for a new kind of social problem. With the boom in home computers and the internet, the argument went, those who did not have access to computers would be in danger of being left behind. There would be a society of "have's" and "have not's," regarding computers, with the "have not's" lacking the skills and experience to compete for jobs in the 21st century.

"There was a large worry that all of the disadvantages that some kids already had, in terms of social class and the education of their parents, would now be further intensified by the fact that poor kids don't have computers at home," says Professor Paul Attewell of the Ph.D. Program in Sociology, who studies the effects of computers on children and has edited, with Norbert M. Seel, the book Disadvantaged Teens and Computer Technologies (Waxmann Publishers, 2003).

The "digital divide" became a civil rights issue and a rallying cry to fix the impending social disaster. Companies such as Microsoft and Intel set up "computer clubhouses" in poor neighborhoods. Schools made huge investments in computer technology. (The governor of Maine, for example, announced a plan to provide every seventh grader in the state with a laptop.) Some theorists, caught up in the excitement, saw computers as a way for students to overcome, or erase, educational disadvantage.

"The spirit of the times said that if you could get a computer on every desk, then you wouldn't have alienated kids," says Attewell. "You would have leaps forward in learning."

But Attewell, whose research project "The Educational Consequences of the Digital Divide" is funded by the National Science Foundation, was not convinced. Given the lack of scientific data showing the benefits of computers on children's education, he wondered, was all of the hype--and the huge dedication of resources--in fact a form of "irrational exuberance"?

"My interest in this was the interest of a skeptic," says Attewell, who has a computer science background as well as being a sociologist (his undergraduate work was partly in computer science), and has kids who were brought up in a computer-intensive household. "There was a lot of reason to be puzzled, and not to believe the simple Utopianism," he says.

With the NSF funding, Attewell, along with graduate students, embarked on a study to measure the impact of computer use on children's education and lives. They analyzed a series of longitudinal data sets--following national samples of students over several years--including information on whether the kids had home computers and how much computer time they had at school. The study took into account rich data about the students' educational experience, the economic background and education level of their parents, performance on standardized tests, and other markers of how kids were doing.

"The findings are interesting but do not support the idea that computers are doing massive things," says Attewell. A paper he co-authored with his Graduate Center colleague Juan Battle found, for example, that if you had a home computer, your kid would do slightly better on achievement tests. "The increase was about the equivalent to taking your kid to the public library on a regular basis--which is to say, not trivial, but a very modest form of cultural enrichment that is equivalent to other forms," he says.

In the case of school computers, the benefits were even less visible. They made almost no difference whatsoever, according to Attewell: "We could not find any evidence in these data sets that the amount of school computing that kids were doing could predict their improvement over time."

Attewell also noticed, in the course of his research, that boys who had home computers got more benefit than girls, and whites were getting more benefit than racial minorities. This led him to think of what he termed the "second digital divide." If the first "digital divide" is about having a computer, then the "second digital divide" asks what kids do with computers once they get them. And do class, education, and other differences that pre-exist the computer simply mould what kids get out of the computer?

In another part of the project, Attewell did ethnographic field research, with graduate student Hella Winston, at a middle school on the Upper West Side. An earlier Graduate Center research project had provided poor students at the school with computers. Attewell and Winston went into kids' homes to see what they were using the computers for, and it contrasted greatly with how more affluent students used computers.

"The kinds of academic problems that the low-literacy kids had...spilled over into use of computers," says Attewell. "We found, for example, that kids who were very bad spellers experienced constant frustrations in using search engines." An anecdote from an after-school program, where kids were encouraged to research potential careers, illustrates this point:

Kadesha says she would enjoy running a bakery. She begins by entering "bakry" into a search engine, but her frustration quickly rises when the search yields no information. She doesn't realize that her search has failed because of an incorrect spelling. Other classmates are having similar problems: one wants to go to burgerking.com to check out employment opportunities, but cannot spell burger, while an aspiring pediatrician struggles with that word. ("Children of the Digital Divide," Attewell and Winston, 2002.)

The research found that poor kids were using the more visual part of the web--looking at pictures, going to rap sites and sports sites, and shopping. Middle class kids would engage in similar activities, but they were also doing other projects that were more pro-active, as in the case of one student who ran an election for class president using an interactive website.

"The kinds of skills that were holding back the poorer kids in traditional literacy were holding them back in their computer usage. And the kinds of advantages that affluent kids had let them go even further," says Attewell.

So far, Attewell's research suggests that we are not going to overcome these traditional disadvantages, based on income and class, with computers: "If anything, we might even be amplifying or expanding these kinds of differences when we throw computers on top." If computers are enormously powerful tools that really change kids' intellectual and academic skills, then it would be a tragedy if poor kids didn't have equal access to computers. But if they are not in fact making a strong impact, then devoting resources to computers--at the expense of traditional literacy and tutoring programs--would be a mistake.

"All around the country, in a time when there are enormous shortages of money and cutbacks in education, money is somehow being carved out for computer technology, and it is a real serious question as to whether this is money well spent," says Attewell.

As his paper "Beyond the Digital Divide" concludes: "We must wait and see whether 'Let them have Pentiums' proves more practical than 'Let them eat cake.'"