A school-wide digital programme has context specific impacts on self-regulation but not social skills

Abstract

It is assumed that digital tools with ubiquitous classroom use have affordances for student agency and a range of social skills. However, few studies have explored the generalised impact of everyday digital classrooms on self-regulation and empathy, perspective taking and prosocial skills. Ten and 11 year old students’ ( n = 115) ratings of self-regulation, social skills and personality were examined in relationship to school-wide practices and instructional foci in two groups of schools ( n = 9) involved in a digital innovation serving low-SES culturally diverse communities. In an early adopting group, students had received a high dosage of three or 4 years of 1:1 digital pedagogy, and in a later adopting group of schools, students had received a low dosage of only 6 months . This natural experiment revealed a context specific effect where high dosage students rated their regulation in digital contexts higher, but not in more general non-digital contexts. However, personality scores particularly those related to self-regulation, were higher for the high dosage students. There were no differences in social skills. The differences were related to the strong focus in the digital innovation on aspects of self-regulation. There was less focus on social skills in the digital innovation. More deliberate teacher augmentation and instructional designs for social skills may be required to capitalise on the affordances of digital tools. School-wide practices, while necessary may not be sufficient to enable the generalisation of skills without this deliberate teacher focus.