Home Computers Equal More Gaming and Less Studying?

Home Computers Equal More Gaming and Less Studying?

ISERP Seed Grant Awardees Seek Answers in Romanian Voucher Program

In the spring of 2006 ISERP Faculty Fellow Cristian Pop-Eleches (SIPA and Economics) and his research partner Ofer Malamud (University of Chicago) were awarded an ISERP seed grant to study the effect of home-computer ownership on  students’ academic achievement.

Two years later the seed grant flourished into a finished report, The Effect of Computer Use on Child Outcomes, published through the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies Working Paper Series.

In 2006, when Pop-Eleches and Malamud applied for the ISERP seed grant, conventional wisdom said if you gave a child a computer, it would increase their educational opportunities. The non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was garnering media attention for their work distributing 100-dollar laptops to children across Ghana, Rwanda, Cambodia and other developing nations, but critics spoke out against the machines, saying the program was too expensive and that without proper instruction children would simply surf the internet, not use the machines for educational purposes.

Academic studies supported both arguments. Opponents cited studies that found children with computers faced social isolation; instead of using them for schoolwork, kids were playing online games actually reducing face-to-face social time. Supporters made reference to studies concluding that computers were a gateway to the developed world and provided more educational opportunities for families in a rapidly globalizing economy.

While the debate over the 100-dollar laptop raged, Pop-Eleches and Malamud found a sample group in Romania. In previous studies samples were somewhat self-selecting. Earlier studies focused on differences between two types of families: ones in which parents wanted computers, meaning they potentially placed a greater emphasis on education, an emphasis that could be indistinguishable from the effect of the computer on student’s achievements, versus families who did not want the computer.

To control for this parental self-selection, Pop-Eleches and Malamud chose to examine a group of families in Romania participating in a government voucher program to provide computers to low-income families. Whether or not each family received a voucher to help them purchase a home computer was based on a straightforward income restriction. By studying the families directly below and above the cut-off line, family situations financially and socially were not substantially different with the exception that families with slightly lower incomes were 50% more likely to own a computer due to the voucher program.

With help from the ISERP seed grant, Pop-Eleches and Malamud conducted household surveys in 2007 of families that had received vouchers in 2005. Giving home computers to Romanian families did not appear to positively affect educational or behavioral outcomes. In fact, children in a household with a computer spent less time doing homework and they had lower school grades.

Their findings would probably not be surprising to any teenager who has spent an afternoon on Facebook rather than writing a paper. Romanian students were no exception. Pop-Eleches and Malamud found the majority of time spent using the computer was not for educational purposes. The two researches wrote in the report that they did find that stay-at-home parents provided more supervision than working parents and that this did “mitigate some of the negative effects of winning a computer voucher and suggests that parental supervision may be an important mediating factor.”

This study was also featured in Slate Magazine and the New York Times.