"Tools in the Hands of Kids"

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

When Angie Nolting learned to use a computer at the Ortonville, Minn., high school last year, she went far beyond basic programming. Mastering an electronic work-sheet program called VisiCalc, the 16-year-old junior built a financial model that showed which livestock operations on her parents' 40-acre farm were no longer profitable, and why. By surveying farms in the area to compare feed costs, weight gain per animal and other variables, Angie discovered that the family's flock of 50 sheep was overfed. Guided by her data, the Noltings cut back on feed outlays. Although the threat of foreclosure forced the family to sell off the sheep and their 40 head of Hereford cattle last December, Angie won a Future Farmers of America prize for her computer model and a free trip last month to Washington.

As schools reopen this month, the number of computers in U.S. classrooms has reached some 1 million (up from 630,000 last year). More and more of them will be used to teach the sort of practical skills that Angie found profitable: financial modeling, data-base management and word processing. Explains Marc Tucker, director of a Carnegie Corp. study on the subject: "Increasingly, schools view computers as intellectual assistants, as tools in the hands of kids, not as things to be programmed or to deliver instructional material."

The most popular use for computers is as word processors. In high school English and business departments that have computers, two-thirds of the teachers are using programs like the Bank Street Writer (300,000 sold) to spare at least some of their students the burden of recopying entire compositions in order to make substantive changes. Also growing in popularity are filing programs and electronic encyclopedias. Scholastic Inc. this year is publishing 15 sets of floppy disks crammed with facts from history, science and language arts. By learning how to cull files for, say, information about major treaties signed by American Indian leaders of the 19th century, students can develop both computer and social-studies skills. Says Walter Koetke, Scholastic's director of technology: "We're responding to the good teachers who say, 'If you want me to use the computer in social studies, you have to show me how it relates.' "

Such clarity of purpose represents a notable change. When computers were first introduced into American schools in the 1960s, they were used the way filmstrips and learning machines had been: to present lessons that progressed $ at a pace consistent with a student's ability. Even today a lively market exists for programs that prepare students for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests or drill them on the multiplication table. But software manufacturers have been less successful in attempts to transfer textbooks onto floppy disks. Texts, after all, usually cost less than $25 and can be used year after year. Most computerized education programs, by contrast, cost $50 to $100 and provide, at best, only a few hours of enrichment.

When microcomputers became readily available, the emphasis shifted from drill and practice to programming. Schools set up computer-literacy labs where technically precocious students learned languages like BASIC and Logo. "No one knew what else to teach," says Robert Taylor, associate professor of computing and education at the Columbia University Teachers College. "It kept the kids occupied, and it was said to teach them to think logically."

But the educational benefits claimed for computer programming have been difficult to prove. One study of sixth-grade Logo programmers found that 69% had memorized the commands that tell the computer to draw a 90 degrees angle on the screen, but only 19% knew how to draw the same angle on paper. Moreover, some educators began to question what Douglas Sloan, former editor of the influential Teachers College Record, called "the hot-house forcing of analytical and abstract thinking at an ever earlier age."

Now schools are focusing on less ambitious goals. At the Bellevue, Wash., high school, Assistant Principal Michael Bacigalupi is phasing out his programming classes and replacing them with word-processing labs available to any student who has a paper to write. A new law in Texas requires junior high students in public schools to take a course on how computers can help them with the rest of their schoolwork. In California's Silicon Valley, some instructors at Cupertino High have started giving extra credit for reports prepared on a computer, sparking a fierce competition among the 1,350 students for the school's 45 machines. Says Principal Evelyn Bachelor: "Sometimes we have to chase students out of the labs to let others have a turn."

Using computers as classroom tools may complicate further a long-standing problem: how to distribute scarce onscreen time. According to Market Data Retrieval, a Connecticut research firm, the number of computers for each school building last year ranged from more than 13 in Florida and Minnesota to five or fewer in Maine and Hawaii. Moreover, wealthy school districts in every state are acquiring new machines at a faster pace than the poorer districts. Says John Hood, who directed the Market Data study: "The trends are disturbing. The students who need computers the most may get to use them the least."

One group that seems sure to benefit from the intensifying presence of computer tools are teachers. As the machines move out of the computer lab and into the rest of the school, teachers are learning what computer instructors already knew: the machines not only attract children like magnets, they can enliven classwork. Columbia's Taylor reports that teachers learning to apply computers to their schoolwork are being "reborn intellectually." Revitalized teachers may be the best dividend a computer can offer. After all, says Faye Wheeler at New York City's Bank Street College of Education, "word processors don't teach good writing, teachers do."

With reporting by Marcia Gauger/New York, with other bureaus