Study: PCs make kids dumber
Students who use computers frequently at school perform worse than their peers at maths and reading.
Those using computers several times a week performed "sizeably and statistically significantly worse" than those who used them less often. Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann of the CESifo economic research organisation in Munich base their conclusions on an analysis of test performance and background data from the 2000 PISA study. This study involved tens of thousands of students in 31 countries, including the UK, organised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The OECD pointed to a positive link between students' interest in computers and their literacy, and Fuchs and Woessmann found that the more computers there were in students' homes, the better their test performance.
However, they realised that more computers in a household generally means a more affluent family. Children from affluent homes tend to perform better academically, so Fuchs and Woessmann factored this in their analysis.
Having done this they found that the more computers there were in a student's home, the worse the student's maths performance.
