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Abstract
Although much contemporary thinking leads to the expectation that communication technology, such as video streaming, enhances educational performance on the average, a dearth of strong evidence consistent or inconsistent with this claim precludes a thoughtful evaluation of it. A series of experiments designed to examine this proposition contributes to filling this lacuna. Third- and eighth-grade students either received or did not receive exposure to one such application, unitedstreaming™, in either their science or social studies classes (or both). Results indicated that this video-streaming application resulted in higher mean examination performance in third-grade science, third-grade social studies, and eighth-grade social studies. No differences between those exposed to this communication technology and those not exposed to it emerged in the eighth-grade science experiment.
Notes
This project was supported by a contract from United Learning Corporation, now Discovery Education.
1. For example, the specific video streaming product studied in this project, unitedstreaming™, has been adopted in 39,000 schools.
2. Some of these coefficients, particularly for the science tests, may be deemed modest. On the other hand, practical considerations, such as school district concerns with intrusiveness, limited the number of test items to which students could be exposed. Because reliability increases, ceteris paribus, with increasing test length, the reliability of the examinations was lower than desired. Unreliability, however, is known to attenuate effects. The fact that substantial effects were found suggests that the modest reliabilities did not serve to infirm the conclusions drawn from these experiments.
3. Subsequent conversations with teachers confirmed that these materials were covered during the time interval over which the experiment was conducted.
4. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this explanation to us.
5. What constitutes a lack of novelty is not specified clearly, however. The burden of proof is on the advocate of such an hypothesis to specify the time period at which the technology is no longer novel; else the explanation is, in principle, unfalsifiable.