Anyway, Frontline is generally worth watching, and free online:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/

My main annoyance is “multitasking”. Humans have no such ability! It is much better described as “context switching”, which has both costs and benefits. Anyone, especially young people, thinking they are fully capable of “doing two or three things at once” is really moronic and harmful. The ego-maniacal MIT students talking about how great they are makes me want to teach there… see how good they are at “multitasking” a real course (you know, the sort where the median exam grade is about 30 out of 100.)

Anyway, I have difficulty concentrating on one task for very long… unless I get into a groove (programming for example). Taking a break or switching every so often incurs a cost, but also provides some benefits such as a fresher perspective when returning to the task. It is something to balance, not falsely believe incurs no cost.

As for the grade school and the laptops. It can certainly be done right, though it can also be wasted effort and resources. Generally, I think that the ability to formulate good questions, synthesize information, and understand general principles is far more useful than something like long division by hand. The real way to evaluate how well a student is learning is to ask them a question they don’t know the answer to and observe how they try to figure it out. The internet, and more generally computers (modeling etc), are a natural fit to that sort of focus.

I once listened to an English teacher bemoan the idea of computers in the classroom. She gave a lengthy speech about the smell of the pages and the feeling of the book in one’s hands. Her romanticized notions of an English class are not without merit, but students simply don’t care about those things these days. This is not because students are callous or unrefined; this is because students have found something that works better for them. Some call wanting to read a novel on an iPad or a Kindle a frivolous desire. If that’s true, then we should call wanting to read a novel in paperback just as frivolous.

We are probably just constructing our lists differently…

Yes, no… I didn’t see it as one thing but an amalgam and you stated “one thing” in reference to the the sum of parts… or list as it were, now clarified apparently. There was no one specific thing. If only that were true we could take afternoon swims in our riches.

The construction of our lists are probably similar although interpretive differences may arise. I wonder for example if the lions share of gains realized were the outcome of computerization or redoubled efforts to teach? I realize this question need not be either/or but there is an important distinction to be made given base populations and budgets in allocations balance between infrastructure and human resources.

I think the point is that they did thine one thing and got a ten fold improvement

Allow me to ask thee what thy one thing was.

In either case, that is a tremendous improvement as Greg points out. You very rarely see that kind of dramatic improvement in test scores at a school.