Does WiFi Make Students Smarter? - Cal Newport

There are a lot of opinions about technology adoption in schools. Overall I’m a fan of less mobile phones in schools, but I've also read reports how gifted students use those same devices to excel beyond the mediocre class content they are in. That is likely a minority compared to the number that just play games or watch TikTok. Newport found an interesting control group on WiFi in school.

The result?

Compared to other counties in the state, Pocahontas County schools had a smaller performance drop and larger recovery. Put another way: the county in which nearly half of the measured students lacked access to WiFi did better than other counties with similar student populations and full access to classroom technology.

The more plausible story told by this data is that rural West Virginia schools are struggling, and something appears to have made this worse around 2015 to 2017 (most likely deteriorating economic conditions). But the solution to these problems is likely not as simple as getting more internet-connected Chromebooks into the students’ hands.

Should technology be in schools and learning? Absolutely yes. But how do we do that while keeping the attention economy out? That is the issue.