You may want to stop and reconsider whether you think a home computer will help your child with reading and math.
A new Duke University study says North Carolina middle school students' test scores dropped after they got home computers, suggesting they spent more time playing "The Sims" than working practice math problems.
The study by Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy challenges the accepted wisdom that children who don't have computers at home are at a disadvantage compared with their wired classmates.
What a great example of a misleading headline. Reading the article and the cited report clarifies. It's when kids get distracted with socializing, not studying, that there's a problem. But that's part of parental involvement. For my family, the computer, which is the gateway to the internet, has provided more opportunity for a broad range of topics and research than we could get from going to a local library where there is no computer available. The News Observer gets a failing grade for this article.
