Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement

About the author: Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement are coauthors of The Child and the Machine: How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk, from which the following viewpoint was excerpted.

The idea that computers in the classroom enhance learning is so widely accepted that few people have questioned it. In reality, there is little evidence to show that computer-assisted education improves students' academic achievement. Research on the subject is ambiguous, and much of it is flawed because it uses standardized testing, which provides a very narrow measure of student achievement. Some research suggests that too much computer use can actually harm students' academic performance, and other studies show that computers in the classroom cause teachers to spend less time with students.

Parents naturally want the best possible education for their...