The past several years have seen laptop prices plunge to commodity levels at the same time that the explosion in WiFi access has made getting them on the 'Net much easier. That's prompted an explosion of one-to-one student:laptop programs, implemented by everything from individual schools to entire states. Hard data on the effectiveness of these programs, however, has been hard to come by. The most recent issue of The Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment is devoted to looking at these programs, and it includes some hard data suggesting that they just might help students handle standardized tests.

There are six papers, all dedicated to looking at different attempts at 1:1 laptop programs at different levels of primary education in the US. A few of those are focused on self-reported surveys of how teachers and students view the programs, however; there are only two that focus on hard numbers obtained via statewide standardized tests.

These are promising signs that these programs can actually have their intended impact on learning.

Still, all of the papers emphasize just how difficult it is to compare programs. Finding a nearby school system that isn't running a laptop program but has equivalent demographics and similar test scores to start with can be a real challenge. There's also substantial variation in how the laptop programs are implemented. Different schools devote different resources to training teachers, providing software and other key factors, and may not provide access to the hardware after school hours. The software and training involved may differ between disciplines, as well—the approaches that make laptops an integral part of science education, for example, won't necessarily work in an English class, where things like data entry never come into play.

Some of those differences were apparent in one of the regions chosen for study, which was in Texas. That state's Technology Immersion Pilot program skipped the cautious, incremental rollout of hardware and simply tried to get as much hardware in the hands of students and teachers as quickly as possible. The paper that analyzes TIP compared 21 schools in the program and attempted to find correlations between various factors, such as access to computers during school hours and student scores on the state's TAKS exam.

The analysis suggests that access during school hours wasn't clearly associated with improvements in test scores. But allowing the students to take the laptops home was: "Home Learning—which measured the extent of a student's laptop use outside of school for homework in each of the four core-subject areas and for learning games—was the strongest implementation predictor of reading achievement." Similar things were seen with math scores.

Another study focused on English education, using a California school district with about 14,000 students, some of whom were in laptop programs, others not. The study focused on an educational phenomenon known as the "fourth grade slump." Apparently, students spend the first few years focusing on developing reading skills, after which the focus shifts to using those skills to gain knowledge in other subject areas—learning to read vs. reading to learn, as the authors put it. The study attempted to determine how the use of laptops influenced the fourth grade slump.

Oddly, the presence of laptops didn't seem to make a difference: no students in the district experienced the fourth grade slump. Instead, the students who weren't enrolled in the laptop program experienced it in fifth grade. Those with the laptops managed to escape without ever experiencing it, and according to the authors, performed best on those portions of the standardized tests that emphasized skills that were targeted by the laptop program.

These are promising signs that these programs can actually have their intended impact on learning. But the studies were relatively small, and it's clear that they need to be replicated in other settings. But the key may be identifying which aspects of the program actually fostered the improved test scores, so that these benefits can be reproduced more widely. As the introduction to this issue states, "While some positive effects are clearly seen in these classrooms, five years or more into the innovation, problems remain, and school cultural factors seem to play an important role in teacher uptake and integration of the technology."

(As a complete aside, one of the more amusing results came from a survey that attempted to determine how individual access to computers was changing how they were used in the classroom. All of items showed significant differences except for two: time spent helping other students with computer problems, and time spent helping teachers. Apparently, giving everyone a laptop helped them learn to help themselves.)

Listing image by Flickr user billaday