Can Gifting Computers to Students Narrow the Achievement Gap?

Roughly one in four children in the United States do not have a computer at home with Internet access. As technological presence in school environments continues to grow, school administrators and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about the disparity in home computing access among students. Consequently, there has been an influx of funding directed towards efforts to supply computers to children without home computer access. Such efforts include large-scale voucher programs and tax breaks on computers purchased for educational purposes. In “Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Home Computers on Academic Achievement among Schoolchildren,” a 2013 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, authors Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson present findings of the largest ever field experiment to test the effect of providing schoolchildren with free computers.

Researchers have not reached consensus on the effectiveness of improving access to home computing and previous studies have not typically employed randomized control methods. Results span the spectrum; some studies find a positive impact on educational outcomes (Attewell and Battle 1999; Beltran, Das and Fairlie 2010; Fairlie 2005; Fiorini 2010; Malamud and Pop-Eleches 2011; Schmitt and Wadsworth 2006) while several studies find a negative impact (Fuchs and Woessmann 2004; Malamud and Pop-Eleches 2011; Vigdor and Ladd 2010). Fairlie and Robinson conducted a randomized controlled experiment of 1,123 students in grades six to ten across 15 schools in California. The authors find that providing free computers to students’ lacking home computer access has no effect on educational outcomes.

Fairlie and Robinson conclude that increasing home computing access alone is unlikely to improve educational outcomes and is also unlikely to have a negative effect on outcomes. The authors specifically find that though computer ownership and usage increased, there was no evidence of effect on educational outcomes such as grades, standardized test scores, credits earned, attendance, and disciplinary actions. Treatment effect estimates on educational outcomes hover around zero and are sufficiently precise to rule out even modestly sized impacts. Furthermore, there is no evidence of an effect at notable points such as pass rates and meeting proficiency standards, even for groups of students that were identified as potentially more likely to benefit. The authors did find that total use of computers for schoolwork increased, despite finding no effect on academic achievement. The authors attribute this to potential offset from increased computer use for entertainment purposes.

A couple points of caution are emphasized for extrapolating results to other environments. First, programs that increase access to home computing may affect US schoolchildren differently compared to schoolchildren in countries with less computer presence in schools. This was the case for the 2011 study conducted by Malamud and Pop-Eleches, who found that a free home computer program had significant negative effects on academic performance for Romanian schoolchildren. Secondly, Fairlie and Robinson caution readers that there may be other effects of computer ownership that are not captured by their study, such as easier access to health and college information and changes in parent communication with teachers. The authors encourage further research to explore other potential benefits.

According to this study, computer ownership alone will not be sufficient to address the achievement gap in the US. Such solo efforts are likely to have a negligible short-term impact on academic outcomes. In an environment of limited resources, the results of this study can be informative to policymakers as they seek to narrow the achievement gap via increasing access to home computers.

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