Volume 1 - Issue 1 - DBU Journal for K-12 Educational Leadership - Page 9

Journal for K-12 Educational Leadership 7 lected for the study had provided laptops and tablets to students at a 1:1 ratio from 2011-2014. Additionally, the school had been piloting policies that allowed students to bring their own devices to school for instructional pur - poses since 2013. In the Spring of 2014, students in the selected middle school completed a district questionnaire designed to assess technology usage and to gather student feedback for tech- nology purchases. As a part of this survey, students were asked to choose which device they preferred to use to access the class curriculum during the 2013-14 school year. Stu- dents chose either school Ipad, school netbook, or my personal device . Also in the spring semester of 2014, the students took the STAAR, tests that cover the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) objectives for various subjects. Students were tested in sixth grade math and reading; seventh grade math, reading, and writing; and eighth grade math, reading, science, and social studies. The data collected from the survey and the state tests were analyzed in a quantitative research, group compari - son design. For each test, the study asked if there was a dif - ference in student achievement levels, as measured by the STAAR test, between sixth grade math students who used school issued netbooks, school issued tablets, or their own personal mobile devices to access the school curriculum. In these questions, the independent variable was the type of device the student used as the primary means of accessing the content; a personal device or the school issued laptop or tablet. In this design, the dependent variable was the actu - al achievement result on the state tests. Because the type of technology used was determined by student choice and was outside the control of the researcher, the study can be classi- fied as a causal comparative design. Since there were three independent groups for each test (6th, 7th, and 8th grade), the scores were compared using a series of one-way-be - tween-subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA), with the as - sistance of SPSS software. All hypotheses were tested using the same procedure and the same alpha level ( p < .05). After each ANOVA run, the researcher determined whether a sig - nificant difference between the means existed and, when necessary, used a Tukey post hoc test to explore how the groups differed. Results and effect sizes are listed in Table 1. (See Table 1 on page 10.) Implications Despite the challenges in generalizing the results of this type of study, there is some useful information that can be ex- tracted from the results. In this study, the data reflected that there were small differences in four of the nine tested areas indicating school issued netbooks allowed students to score better than using school issued Ipads or their own personal technology devices. There was one area, seventh grade writ - ing, where netbooks had an advantage over students’ per - sonal devices, but in this test, no statistical difference over school provided Ipads was indicated. Since none of the tests indicated an overall advantage for students using school is- sued tablet devices, these findings confirmed the belief of many educators that school wide tablet programs are not the best model for improving achievement (Barrett, 2012; Herold, 2014). The study results also demonstrated that in the five tested areas where the null hypothesis was reject - ed, bring your own device programs do not, by themselves, make a positive difference when compared to school issued netbook or tablet programs. The results of this study do provide some limited sta- tistical evidence that the choice of technology model made a significant impact on student achievement. In four of the nine tested areas, students who used school provided net - books scored slightly better on standardized tests than those who used school provided tablets and, in five of the nine tested areas, those same netbook students did better than students who preferred to use their own personal technol - ogy. There were no tests performed that indicated that stu - dents using school provided tablets or their own personal devices scored higher on state achievement tests. In each case, though, the effect size was small, suggesting other fac - tors had a larger impact on student achievement. Although the netbook students scored marginally high- er on state achievement tests, these results imply BYOD pro- grams and policies that are being implemented, largely for financial reasons (O’Donovan, 2009), can continue without a dramatic negative impact on student achievement. Since the results of this study show such small differences in a school that is piloting bring your own device policies in an