Research - and my own experience - suggests that shoving everything online doesn’t benefit children or the learning experience
I know how the many hours I spend online each day makes me feel – like a hamster on a crappy, usually cracked, budget plastic wheel, never quite getting where I need to go but always scrambling onwards, with that tantalising view of unknown territory constantly unravelling ahead of me.
Adults often complain about being chained to screens. We talk about how it affects our mental and physical health, our ability to think straight, never mind sit up straight. But here we are, locking our children into similarly computer-bound lives from very young ages.
Regardless of your approach as a parent, the line taken by our education system seems to be that online is best, whatever the age or subject. This week, The i Paper revealed that two more GCSE exams will be available online by 2027, from the examiner Edexcel, who said: “If there is enough demand then most GCSEs and A-Levels could be made available on screen as an option by 2030.”
Overall, why does moving learning away from printed texts and physical activities towards the digital and online matter? I don’t oppose technology for the sake of it. But so much recent research – and my own experience – suggests that shoving everything online doesn’t benefit children or the learning experience. Rather the screen-eye-hand relationship diminishes education, paring back activities that once demanded a variety of mental and motor skills into tick box and tap key reflexes.
We all know how lovely it is to get a handwritten note over a “thanks mate, great night xx” text. And while I love the accessibility that Audible gives me, reading and listening are different experiences. I try to stick to non-fiction in my ears, but whenever I start listening to a really great novel, currently Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, I know I’ll have to go back and read it to really luxuriate in the brilliant writing. With Audible, I am frequently rewinding to get the full meaning.
These kinds of differences are borne out by a recent report from Columbia University, which studied children’s brains and found they derive greater meaning from printed texts than from screens. The study looked at 59 children aged 10-12, and found that “deeper reading” came from looking at a printed text over a digital text, where “shallow reading was observed”. After reading, the children were asked to look at words that were both related and unrelated to the text, and they had to work much harder to create meaningful connections after the on-screen reading experience.
As well as spending time online at school, my eight-year-old’s home learning is entirely directed by maths, reading and spelling apps that offer infinite tasks and ridiculous rewards. I don’t think Steiner schools have got everything right, but for the first time in recent years, I have begun to really envy the learning experiences that the children there will have compared to those at regular schools, because of the out of control focus on screens above everything else.
Anyone with primary school age children will be well acquainted with a number of these apps. Our school requests the pupils do a few minutes of each a few times a week, but doesn’t check up on anything. These aren’t unreasonable requests in themselves. And I’m not concerned about the time commitment. But I am deeply disappointed by the fact that everything is online.
After a long day at school, with some time spent online – though it’s hard to determine exactly what happens once those gates close – we’re expected to fire up those screens and set fire to our children’s patience, tolerance, and capacity for emotional regulation right before bedtime.
Most of the parents I speak to agree that the maths app Times Table Rock Stars is useful for building a strong foundation in that area, but my daughter is only interested in what new accessory she’s won. It works by incentivising children to learn through offering vapid virtual rewards, thus teasing our basest instincts from a very young age, and calling it education.
Another app is Accelerated Reader. The logic behind this is sound: children have to answer a short quiz for comprehension after each book they read. But we might spend weeks on a long or more complex book, reading a few pages together each evening, which does nothing for her overall scores. My bete noir is most certainly Mathletics, a spinning wheel of infinite purgatory, something a modern-day Dante is surely behind, rubbing his ink stain-free fingers with glee as his real-world bank account fills up.
When my daughter was first introduced to it in Year 3, over 50 tasks were set for her. “How does she know what to do?” I asked her teachers. I was told she could read through the titles and select which to complete based on what she’d done that week. That’s right: asking seven-year-olds to choose from over 50 tasks before they even start the work. Imagine your boss asking you to do that each morning.
This has since been adjusted to offer her a few tasks each week. I definitely don’t blame teachers. They are required to teach in whatever way the school sets out. They don’t have answers for me when I question the load of online learning, because they’re not permitted to have opinions. Parents, of course, are permitted to voice their opinions, and do so loudly and frequently.
“My children’s homework is often designed to be done on a tablet or on a phone,” says one friend. “I hate doing it with them this way and really notice what a more calm and rewarding experience it is for them when we use paper and pen.
“They also seem to watch a lot more TV at school than I ever did as a child – if it’s raining at lunch, or if they’ve got a class reward for good behaviour, the prize seems to be putting a film on which depresses me. They watch Newsround regularly and watch YouTube videos to learn about various subjects. I know they need to be tech savvy for the modern world, but given all the research about smartphones, and pressure on parents to reduce screen time, it feels excessive.”
One thing my school is doing well is holding back the reward of a handwriting pen. My daughter refused to practise most of last year, because it “tires my hands out” and she “couldn’t be bothered” to use capital letters. Oh, was she desperate for that pen! Studies show that writing by hand is far better for our brains than typing, leading to far more elaborate brain connectivity patterns. “We urge that children, from an early age, must be exposed to handwriting activities in school to establish the neuronal connectivity patterns that provide the brain with optimal conditions for learning,” found the Norwegian study. Twenty states in the US have this year reintroduced handwriting into curriculums.
“Children who have learnt to write and read on a tablet can have difficulty differentiating between letters that are mirror images of each other, such as ‘b’ and ‘d’,” said neuropsychology professor and lead researcher Audrey van der Meer. “They literally haven’t felt with their bodies what it feels like to produce those letters.”
Fearne Cotton has spoken about her children having too much screen time at school on her podcast Happy Place, pointing out that we don’t even know how much time our children are online during the day, and often it’s far more than the school lets on.
In a recent episode of their Parenting Hell podcast called “Time to Ban Homework”, Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe speak out against adding to parents’ domestic loads. Maybe this is one reason I hate the apps so much: just when I’ve logged off for the day and am trying to refocus, I have to log back on with an angry child who cannot regulate anything once a screen is yet again shoved in front of her.
Technology developers and sales people have far more to gain from flogging all kinds of tech, both devices and software, to schools and education authorities all over the world, than children stand to gain from using them.
I understand that education providers don’t want to fall behind, but they stand no chance against big tech when it comes to fairly assessing what does and what doesn’t benefit young learners.
My daughter still hasn’t got her handwriting pen. Maybe future pupils won’t even be working towards one.