chapter 6
THE INTERNET AND EDUCATION

Knowing how to use an Internet browser has become as important a skill in modern life as knowing multiplication tables. Internet illiteracy restricts a person's access to job listings, e-mail communication, online information sources, and dozens of convenient, efficient tools that make work and life easier. Aware of this, high schools and colleges in the late 1990s increased efforts to expose students to the Internet before graduation. Most secondary and elementary schools installed computers with Internet access in classrooms and libraries. College administrations provided widespread broadband access to students on campus, and many professors began requiring the use of the Internet in college courses.

Due in part to these actions, high school students and college students were among the most Internet-savvy Americans at the turn of the century. According to Steve Jones in The Internet Goes to College (Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, September 15, 2002), nearly 86% of the 14.5 million college students in 2002 had been online. A similar report released in 2001 by Pew/Internet reported that 73% of young people aged twelve through seventeen had gone online. The percentage of Internet users in both demographics were well above the overall percentage of adult Americans who had been online at the time.

Providing students with access to the Internet, however, has not been without problems. Not only did the Inter-net provide a great deal of distraction for many young people, but it also opened up an avenue for plagiarism. Largely because of the Internet, academic cheating and plagiarism skyrocketed around the turn of the millennium. Students appeared to have no qualms about copying text from the Internet and pasting it verbatim into reports and papers. A 2003 study conducted by Donald McCabe of Rutgers University in conjunction with the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University revealed that 38% of students had used the cut-and-paste technique, and 44% regarded the practice as "trivial or not cheating at all."

ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS

On February 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law. This legislation ushered in the E-rate program, which provides elementary and secondary public schools with discounts of 20% to 90% when purchasing computers for libraries and classrooms. The program had a tremendous impact on computer and Internet accessibility in public schools. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) surveyed a cross section of elementary and secondary U.S. public schools of all sizes and in all states and published the results in Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2002 (October 2003). As Table 6.1 shows, almost all public schools had Internet access by 2002. The availability of the Internet in public schools grew rapidly in the late 1990s and then leveled off. Only 35% of public schools were wired in 1994. By 1997 nearly 78% had Internet access, and in 1999, 95% were connected to the Internet. Though private schools generally have the reputation for maintaining better facilities than public schools, Table 6.2 reveals that private schools lagged behind in terms of Internet access. Of all private schools surveyed, only 67% had access to the Web in 1999. More Catholic schools were wired in 1999 (83%) than other types of private schools.

As to the type of Internet connection found in public schools, the NCES survey found that in 2002, 94% of public schools had always-on broadband connections as opposed to dial-up. (See Table 6.3.) This was a huge increase from 1996 when a full 74% of schools still used dial-up connections. Wireless connections were also on the rise. Some 23% of public schools had wireless connections in 2002. Larger schools were more likely to have a wireless connection. Only 17% of smaller schools (three hundred students or fewer) had wireless Internet connections as opposed to 37% of larger schools (one thousand students or more).

Internet Use in the Classroom

Table 6.4 reveals that in 2002, 92% of public school classrooms had Internet access. The number of wired

TABLE 6.1

classrooms had increased fairly steadily since 1994 when only 3% of classrooms had Internet access. The more minorities and impoverished students the school had, the less likely the school was to have classrooms with Internet access. City schools were also less likely to have wired classrooms than rural or suburban schools.

Counting the number of instructional rooms with Internet access, however, does not necessarily render an accurate picture of how much exposure children had to the Internet during class. A better yardstick for student exposure is the ratio of students to instructional (class-room) computers with Internet connections. As Figure 6.1 shows, the number of students per instructional computer with Web access in 2002 was 4.8—a substantial decrease from 1998 when the ratio was 12.1 to 1. Table 6.5 is a breakdown of students to Internet accessible computers by minority enrollment, school size, school locale, and other factors. Surprisingly, rural area schools had more instructional computers with Internet access per student than city, urban, or town schools in 2002. In rural areas, one Internet-equipped computer was present for every four students. In the city, only one Internet-equipped computer was present for every 5.5 students. Schools with 50% minority enrollment had roughly one instructional, Internet-ready computer for every 5.1 students, whereas schools with less than 6% minority enrollment had four students for each computer. Smaller schools and schools with more impoverished students also tended to have fewer classroom computers with Internet access.

According to the NCES in Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2002, one-half of teachers reported that they used the Internet for instruction during class time in 1999. Only one-third of teachers, however, felt they were adequately prepared to use the Internet to teach classes. To improve this situation, schools began offering their teachers Internet training courses. By 2002, 87% of schools with Internet access reported that their school or school district offered teachers professional instruction on ways to integrate the use of the Internet into the classroom curriculum.

TABLE 6.2

Access to Inappropriate Material

In 1996 Congress established the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). Under CIPA schools that could not prove that they use filtering or blocking technology to keep children from viewing pornographic or sexually explicit Web sites were no longer eligible for the E-rate program. Consequently, almost all schools (99%) with Internet access in 2002 used some type of technology or procedure to control the access students had to content on the Internet. The types of controls various schools used can be seen in Table 6.6. Ninety-six percent of schools in 2002 employed Internet content filtering or blocking software. Teachers or staff monitored students' activities online in 91% of schools with Internet access. Some 82% of schools required written contracts from the parents, and 77% required written contracts from students. Monitoring software, which tracks the Web pages that individual student's visit, was used in 52% of schools.

Computers at Home and at School

Table 6.7 displays the percentage of American children who had computer and Internet access available to them at home in 1999. Sixty-five percent of children had access to a home computer, and 30.4% had Internet access at home. To level the playing field between kids who had access to Internet and those who did not, many public schools began allowing children access to school computers before and after regular school hours. Table 6.8 reveals that 53% of wired public schools allowed students to log onto the Internet outside of regular hours. Of these, most (96%) permitted access after hours, three-quarters (74%) let students come in before school, and a small number (6%) granted students use of the Internet on the weekends.

The NCES reported in Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2002 that in 2002 8% of public schools surveyed provided laptop computers for their students to use as well. Only seven laptops, however, were available on average at these schools. Of the schools that provided laptops to students, 59% reported they typically lent laptops to students for less than one week. Nineteen percent said they lent students laptops between one week and a month, and 16% of these schools offered use of the laptops to students for the entire school year. Seven percent of schools that did not offer laptops in 2002 planned to do so during the 2003–04 school year.

School Web Sites

According to the NCES in Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2002, 86% of all public schools had created a Web site by 2002, an increase from 75% the year before. (See Table 6.9.) Ninety-four percent of large schools (one thousand or more students) and 84% of small schools (three hundred students or fewer) had a Web site. The percentage of Web sites maintained by rural schools

TABLE 6.3

and suburban schools was much higher than for schools in urban areas. Schools were also less likely to have a Web site if they had a high enrollment of minority students.

Of schools in the NCES survey that reported having a Web site, 68% updated their site at least monthly; 32% updated their site less often than once a month. In addition, only 2% of all Web sites were student run. Nearly

FIGURE 6.1

one-third (29%) of the Web sites were administered by a teacher or other staff member as part of their responsibilities. Eighteen percent of school Web sites were managed by teachers or staff members on a voluntary basis.

Internet Use among Teens

The Pew Internet & American Life Project (Pew/Internet) estimated in Teenage Life Online (Washington, DC: 2001) that seventeen million (73%) young people aged twelve through seventeen had used the Internet sometime in their life. Of these, 11% (1.9 million) primarily accessed the Internet through the computers provided at school. (See Table 6.10.) Sixty-four percent of online students said they went online at school occasionally. The survey found that those students dependent on school computers were more likely to come from single-parent households, low-income families, and families that do not use the Internet. Most online teenagers replied they used the Internet primarily at home. In fact, nearly 83% (fourteen million) reported they go online most often at home, which was a much higher percentage than that reported by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1999. (See Table 6.7.) The Pew/Internet study also found that 3% of students used a friend's house most often, 1% used the public library, and 1% went someplace else such as a cyber café for access.

Fully 94% of online students logged on to the Internet to do research for school. When asked where they retrieved

TABLE 6.4

information for their last major report, 71% of online teens said they primarily relied on the Internet, 24% responded that they used library resources, and 4% said they utilized both equally. Students felt that conducting research for classes using the library was more difficult than surfing the Internet. When asked about the validity of information on the Internet, many teenagers replied that they did not trust everything on the Web and instinctively knew which Web sites provided accurate information.

As Table 6.11 shows, teens used the Internet most to send and receive e-mail and instant messages. Of daily teenage Internet users, almost all (99%) used e-mail, roughly nine-tenths (89%) sent instant messages, and three-quarters (73%) downloaded music online. There were a number of activities that teenagers engage in online much more than adults, as Table 6.12 reveals. Seventy-four percent of teens used instant messaging, as opposed to only 44% of adults. A similar discrepancy existed between the percentage of online teenagers who played or downloaded games (66%) and online adults who partook in these activities (34%). Teenagers also listened to more music online, visited more chat rooms, downs-loaded more music, and checked sports scores more often than adults.

COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

No group was more wired in 2002 than college students. According to Jones in The Internet Goes to College, nearly 86% of the 14.5 million college students in 2002 had been online. (See Table 6.13.) Surprisingly, many students first started using the Web regularly only in college. Roughly half (49%) of online college students first became Internet users in college, while the other half (47%) had used the Internet before college. All college students had used a computer by the time they were nineteen, and 20% had used a computer before the age of nine.

As to time spent on the Internet per week, 75% of online college students were online four or more hours a

TABLE 6.5

week. Nineteen percent were hardcore users, devoting twelve hours or more to the Internet. Although 85% of college students owned a computer, 33% reported that they used a campus computer more often than their own. In terms of demographics, Table 6.13 reveals that slightly more men (87%) were online in 2002 than women (85%). Some 90% of white college students were online, versus 82% of Hispanic students, and 74% of African-American students.

As can be seen in Table 6.14, the most popular Internet activity among college students was communicating socially, which was also the most popular activity for teenagers. Forty-two percent of college students used the Internet to e-mail and instant message friends more often than they used it for any other activity. Engaging in work for classes came in a close second at 38%. Only 10% of college students used the Internet for entertainment more than they used it for any other purpose. Based on statistics from the marketing research firm comScore Media Metrix, Table 6.15 displays a list of twenty Web sites in 2002 where a disproportionate amount of hits came from college students. The list generally reflects the activities noted in Table 6.14. The number one Web site on the list is Live-Journal (www.livejournal.com). Combining entertainment with communication, this Web site allows people to create an online journal (blog) for others to read. While most of the other Web sites are related to gaming and music, a few are linked to academic and cultural endeavors. FastWeb (fastweb.monster.com) is a search engine for those looking for scholarships, and DueNow.com (www.duenow.com) is a homework resource center for students.

College Students and Communication

In The Internet Goes to College Jones concluded that the most popular Internet activity for students was social communication with others. Some 85% of college students believed the Internet to be a convenient way to interact with others. Table 6.16 lists the people college students communicated with the most via the Internet. Friends topped the chart (72%), followed by family (10%), and professors (7%). Only a small fraction (6%) of college students communicated most with their romantic partners, and fewer still (5%) primarily communicated with work colleagues. Sixty-nine percent of undergraduates replied, however, that they still liked to use the phone more than the Internet to talk to people. Many students simply saw the Internet as a way to touch base with people or set up a time to talk on the phone or in person at a later date. Fully 19% of college students said they had dealt with someone first online before meeting them in person. Forwarding jokes and other messages to friends and family was the most popular online social activity among wired college students.

E-mail was by far the favorite online communications tool used by online undergraduates in 2002. (See Table 6.17.) Twice as many students preferred e-mail over instant messaging as their primary method of keeping in touch with others online. Online college students, however, used instant messaging far more than the general population of Internet users. (Only half of all adult Internet users in 2002 used instant messaging, as opposed to three-quarters of undergraduates.) The third favorite communications tool employed by college students was Web boards, followed by chat rooms, and finally newsgroups. As to the time spent communicating, 25% of all college students reported that they interact socially online three or more hours a week.

College Students and Academics

Though the two are not mutually exclusive, the Inter-net appeared to occupy as much time as homework for

TABLE 6.6

most students, according to Jones in The Internet Goes to College. Only 14% of students said they studied twelve hours or more a week. Two thirds (62%) claimed they studied for less than seven hours per week. Despite the potential distraction posed by the Internet, 79% of college students believed the Internet impacted their academic experience favorably.

E-mail has greatly affected the relationship between student and professor. About 47% of all college student said their professor required them to use e-mail as part of a class. Professors tended to use e-mail the most to notify the entire class of changes to homework assignments or to make general announcements such as class cancellations. Eighty-two percent of undergraduates reported receiving assignment information via e-mail during their college career. This student-professor relationship, however, was generally a one-way affair. Half (51%) of online college students rarely e-mailed their professors, and only roughly one-tenth (11%) contacted their professor once or more a week via e-mail. The rest were somewhere in between. In terms of what students e-mailed professors about, three quarters (75%) of college students said they had used e-mail to contact a professor sometime in their college career to ask about an assignment. Almost two-thirds (62%) of students had used email to arrange a time to meet, and roughly the same amount (58%) had e-mailed a professor to discuss grades. E-mails also allowed students to express their views and opinions to professors. The Pew/Internet study on college life reported that in 2002 nearly 46% of online college students agreed that e-mail was useful in articulating ideas that they did not feel comfortable verbalizing in class. A quarter (25%) of online students used e-mail to tell professors they were unable to finish an assignment, and two-thirds (65%) notified their professors of absences via e-mail. Overall, half of online students believed in 2002 that e-mail improved their inter-action with their professor.

The Internet also gave students who lived on and off campus the ability to collaborate with one another on coursework without having to leave their rooms. Sixty-nine

TABLE 6.7

percent of undergraduates felt that e-mail was a good way to maintain contact with classmates regarding class. Seventy-five percent said they used the Internet to confer with classmates about a group project, and 31% reported that they e-mailed classmates once a week or more.

The Internet has also become a primary resource of information for school reports and papers. According to statistics published on the Web site of the Association of Research Libraries (www.arl.org), reference queries at university libraries have fallen sharply since the late 1990s when Internet use became widespread. In The Internet Goes to College, Jones found that in 2002, 73% of college students used the Internet more than the library when searching for information. Only 9% of students said they used the library more than the Internet. Like high school students, college students felt that using the library was much more difficult than surfing the Web. Jones's Pew/Internet report on college life further revealed that when students were observed using school library computers, they were typically looking for information on commercial Web browsers rather than the library's Web sites. Many professors and librarians worried that the Internet has made students less adept at finding credible resources when researching a topic. These educators feared that college students were more interested in a quick fix than in sound research techniques.

College Students and Entertainment

College students use the Internet to entertain themselves much more than the general population. According to Jones in The Internet Goes to College, a little over three-quarters (78%) of college students went online for fun in 2002, versus only roughly two-thirds (64%) of the general online adult

TABLE 6.8

population. In no area was this more apparent than with music. According Jones, 59% of online college students listened to streaming music on the Internet, as opposed to 39% of online adult Americans. Students were twice as likely to download music over the Internet than the general adult population. Only 28% of adults downloaded music in 2002, compared to 60% of college students. A full 44% of online college students took part in a file-sharing networks and shared files from their own computers. Only 26% of the general adult population took part in music file sharing.

In July 2003 Pew/Internet released another study by Steve Jones, Let the Games Begin, a survey conducted on the gaming habits of college students. The survey found that about 70% of college students played computer, video, or online games once in a while. Table 6.18 is a breakdown of what types of games college students played most. Some 71% said they played computer games. Video games and online games followed at 59% and 56%, respectively. The study speculates that these numbers had to do with accessibility of computer games. Computer games, such as Solitaire or Tetris variants, could be played on a laptop in class, in a computer lab, or wherever there was a computer. As to gender, men generally preferred to play video games, but a higher percentage of women played online and computer games. Roughly 60% of women played online and computer games, as opposed to 40% of men. The Pew/Internet report suggests that women enjoyed nonaction card and puzzle games, and these games could be found on a computer. Online games provided the benefit of anonymity, and many online gaming sites catered to women's interests and tastes. Video games, on the other hand, were often violent, and when they did feature female characters, the characters often had oversized breasts and were scantily clad. Of all those college students who did play games, most believed the experience to be a positive one. Half of the gamers, however, said that they used video games as a way of avoiding their studies.

DISTANCE LEARNING

Jones's September 2002 Pew/Internet report on the Internet and college revealed that distance learning was

TABLE 6.9

not very popular among college students in 2002. Roughly 6% of students surveyed had taken online courses for credit, and only half of these students believed the courses were worthwhile. Despite how undergraduates felt about distance learning, the number of people enrolled in distance learning courses offered by postsecondary (i.e., following high school) institutions nearly doubled between the 1997–98 and 2000–01 school years. (See Figure 6.2.) According to Tiffany Waits and Laurie Lewis in Distance Education at Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions: 2000–2001 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, July 2003), 3.1 million students were enrolled in distance learning classes. Of these, 2.9 million people were in college-level, credit-granting courses. As Figure 6.2 reveals, in 2000–01 public two-year institutions, such as community colleges, had the highest enrollment in distance education classes, followed by public four-year institutions, and private four-year institutions.

TABLE 6.10

TABLE 6.11

The widespread use of the Internet and personal computers largely explains the growth in distance learning. E-mail allows for affordable, convenient day-to-day communication between teachers and students. CD-ROMs and the Internet provide the possibility for completely interactive course modules and timed tests. A full 90% of institutions surveyed in the NCES study offered Internet courses where the students could review the course material on their own timetable (in other words, not in sync with everyone else in the class). Forty-three percent of institutions offered synchronous Internet courses where all students in the class were required go on the Internet at the same time to receive instruction or take tests. Nearly a third (29%) of the schools delivered the course material to students via CD-ROM. In 2003 this growth in high-tech distance learning appeared as if it would continue. Nearly 88% of institutions said they planned on increasing or introducing Internet courses into their distance learning programs in the next three years, and 39% planned to use CD-ROMs more as well.

TABLE 6.12

CHEATING

Cheating is one of the biggest problems facing academia today and includes any instance in which a student breaks the rules for an assignment or test to gain an advantage over fellow classmates. A specific type of cheating known as plagiarism occurs when a student submits someone else's work as his or her own. Plagiarism itself has several forms, including purchasing a previously written paper, copying sentences or ideas from an original source document without proper attribution, or paying someone else to complete the work. In 1999 Donald L. McCabe, founder and president for the Center for Academic Integrity (CAI), conducted a survey of 2,100 college students at twenty-one campuses across the country. The survey results, which are posted in part on the CAI Web site (www.academicintegrity.org), revealed that a full three-quarters of all college students cheated. Of those who admitted cheating in 1999, one-third said they had cheated seriously on a test and half said they had cheated seriously on written assignment. A 2001 survey involving 4,500 high school students at twenty-five schools demonstrated that the problem was perhaps worse in high school. Seventy-four percent of high school students admitted cheating on a test in a serious manner, and 72% said they cheated on a written assignment in a serious manner. In "Colleges Clamp Down on Cheaters" (Karen Thomas, USA Today, June 20, 2001), McCabe noted that academic cheating will continue to escalate unless schools impose stricter policies because high school students have "defined their own rules and will take them to college." Many students cheat because they believe others are getting away with it, and they want to stay competitive.

TABLE 6.13

TABLE 6.14

The Internet and other information technologies have only served to fuel American's cheating epidemic. Phones with instant messaging allow students the opportunity to communicate with outsiders or others in class during a test. Companies that specialize in writing papers for students, commonly known as "paper mills," can now deliver papers discreetly to students via e-mail. The Internet in general provides an endless source of documents and papers from which students might copy material. Catching plagiarism on the Web, however, involves combing through countless articles and Web sites. The issue of plagiarism on the Internet is further complicated by the fact that the Internet has obscured the distinction between what information requires attribution and what information is public knowledge. According to McCabe's research, 10% of college students admitted to cut-and-paste online plagiarism in 1999. Only two years later, nearly 41% of students admitted to using the Internet to plagiarize, and as many as 68% of students did not think this type of plagiarism was a big deal. Of high school students in 2001, more than 50% admitted to using the Internet to plagiarize.

TABLE 6.15

The CAI Web site suggested that one of the more effective ways to control cheating is to set up an honor code. Honor codes place the responsibility not to cheat on the student. Teachers monitor students less and rely on other students to turn in cheating classmates. Since the cheater has been made aware of the rules, penalties in honor code schools can be very stiff. According to the CAI Web site, honor codes typically reduced cheating on tests by one-third to one-half of normal levels. To catch plagiarizers some schools are also using high-tech online services. In her USA Today article, Thomas reported that the service teachers relied on most in 2002 was Turnitin.com. This online service receives papers from teachers and scans them into a database. The papers then are checked against more than two billion Web sites, a quarter of a million previously submitted student papers, and a number of books and encyclopedias. The site handled nearly six thousand papers daily in 2002. Of these, more than 30% of papers typically turned out to be fakes (i.e., from a paper mill), and 75% contained plagiarized text from the Internet.

FIGURE 6.2

TABLE 6.16

TABLE 6.17

TABLE 6.18