How technology impacts students grades

How technology Impacts Students Grades

Running Head: Technology Impacts on student grades

Hallie Alongi

Living and Learning in a Digital Society

Sara Lohnes Watulak

How Technology Affects Students’ Grades

Abstract

The continuous evolution of technology has been received with appreciation by a number of individuals. Technology is responsible for the improvement of communication and has heightened the level of interaction bringing up the idea of globalization. Despite the positive characteristics addressed by technology, parents are a concerned lot because of implications technology has impacted on the young ones in the society. Basically the questions these parents raise are whether technology is an impediment in school performance or it is an enhancer on the levels of studies undertaken by the students.

The minds of children can be referred to, as blank pages, which can be written anytime with any content, ones the content has been scribbled chances, are that they cannot be easily rubbed off. The 21st century generation has a higher level of quick-wittedness, which makes them more important on the duration of their brilliance, therefore allowing them to fill in any content very fast with the information at their fingertips. Such information can be removed from a number of sources with the fastest being from the Internet, games, televisions, and other online platforms which are easier to access. This makes it challenging for parents to control since; television sets are always used in our daily lives, cellphones have become a necessity, if not a requirement and generally technology is here with us and it is to stay (Ritchell 2011).

In this paper I am going to depict how technology has become an impediment in school going children. I am going to illustrate the conditions that have simulated a 21st century child to perform less as compared to a 19th century era kid. I will also attribute some of the detrimental technological innovations that are continuously posing a threat and if not properly managed will be catastrophic to the school going children. It is important to point out that there are always two sides of a coin (bad and good); this means that technology itself is not bad, but if overused.

As much as technology is important in educational purposes, it can turn detrimental on a high scale if the instructors do not take note of the manner in which they use it. Standardized tests cannot be used as a basis for gauging the importance of technology in classroom scenarios, since it hinders knowledge application from the student’s perspectives (Ritchell 2010). Some of the negative impacts of technology in classroom scenarios are as discussed.

Factors Contributing To Lower Grades

Takes away learning time

Technology is never without its troubles, while in class ta computer may develop mechanical or software problems which in turn translate to failure of performance. This will mean that the students in that class will lose a lot of time waiting for the problem to be established and rectified. This in turn will drag down their learning pace immensely. It is imperative to note that the curriculum is always set and guided by given rules and policies. This means that missing any particular lesson will amount to an overload of work at the end of a particular learning period. This gets worse if the whole state was to undertake the same paper, there will be a significant amount of discrepancies since a particular school did not cover all the topics they were expected to translating to lower performance scales (Martin 2013).

Lack of integration

Some students learn better by association and interaction, this beats logic in employing the use of technology to such students. The best method to use in such situations is to let the teacher undertake their role personally without the need of a computer otherwise such students will be a disadvantage. Use of the technology fails to recognize the particular needs of individual students. It treats all students as the same which is not actually true. Some children have a higher span of memorability while others have a higher degree of association techniques. Thus, using technology in such classrooms will depict an irregular graph that portrays lack of harmonized results. The best approach to such is for the teacher to recognize each student’s weaknesses and strengths and address them in the best way possible (Gonchar 2012).

Game mentality

This is the highest syndrome, which is possessed by many children. It can be articulated that according to research 75% of children aged 6-15 years prefer to play a game instead of learning through a computer. The main reason that different manufacturers in the globe are because of the addictive nature of the games designs this. This means that each time such a child is left on their own, chances are that they will only embark on playing games instead of indulging in studies. The resultant effect of this is that their classroom performance will drop to lower grades, hence the negative aspects of technology.

Lower Attention span

Children of today will spend their significant time on movies or playing games. This illustrates that they are only left with approximately 25% of their attention to concentrate on other matters. Unfortunately, there may not be a willingness to perform duties correlated with schoolwork and if asked to do so they will just scribble through to rush to a movie or play an online game. Just like the parents do, the children will definitely be absorbed in the movies or television series most of the times. Experience is one aspect which also triggers the likelihood of development of a concentration span. For instance, if a child is brought up in a family where parents take things the way they come and never work hard for them then there is a chance that children in that family will never work hard to perform. Instead, they will opt to go for technological components since they are more soothing (Klaus 2013).

Laptop use

Laptops have entirely replaced pens in present education systems, this means that students rarely do write using pens instead they just type and on most occasions prefer accessing the online catalogues which have reduced the burden for them to analyze the teacher’s notes. There is however, a huge problem associated with this practice, student grades eventually starts to dwindle. According to a Canadian research conducted on a number of institutions it was apparent that those students who use laptops in classrooms, while the teacher is teaching suffer lower grades as compare to those students who embrace the old fashion of writing small notes using a pen and a piece of paper. The difference arises because of the degree of distraction in the two groups. Those using laptops are more distracted by pop-up menus and screen advertisements as compared to the second group (Lebedev 2012).

Facebook and other social platforms impacts

People are beginning tor relate the letter “F” in Facebook to the failing grades in school. Throughout all of the articles that are being written, it is apparently that the fact that students with social media, such as Facebook, are receiving lower grades than the average student who doesn’t have any type of social media. Multi-tasking has been the norm on various platforms in the 21st century; people often try to combine various activities together especially if they are technologically related. For instance a student engages in texting, attending to music and reading simultaneously. “Essentially this is a poor combination of activities and the resultant effect is poor results” (Makela 2011).

Other negative impacts of technology in education

In the article it states that basically more than half of children ranging from the age 2 to 5- years old can play computer games while only 10 percent of those kids know how to tie their shoes. It is becoming absurd that the normal activates of a young child are becoming harder and less common due to technology. This also depicts that such students will not be able to associate learning principles without the help of technology. Thus, overreliance on technology can sometimes turn detrimental, if not monitored from an early age simply because the children will just grow up to understand that a world without technology is not livable at all (Costabile & Spears 2012).

Conclusion

Technology is always and will remain to be an important tool in our world. It has brought a lot of significant aspects which we could have missed out on if it was completely in-existent. However, as discussed above its use must be totally regulated to a given level beyond which it will be of harm than good. Not all sectors of the economy need to be 100% computerized, some sectors should allow people to approach problems without the aid of a computer this applies to schools and any platform which propagates for creativity (Bouchard 2014).

In conclusion, overuse of technology has led to detrimental side effects in the school curriculum. Instead of students studying, they engage in activities like watching movies, Facebook interactions, twitter posts and any other social platforms which are not generally important in their classrooms. The most and common problem associated with technological advancement is the rampant innovation of games, which has attracted a greater amount of people.

References

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April 2014. Retrieved from: http://classroom.synonym.com/negative-effects-using-technology-todays-classroom-4130.html

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http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=THC. Cambridge University Journals

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