The Urgent Need to Move Schools Online: Four Things Your School District Needs to Know Before Taking Action

In the Rush to Plan for Online Contact Hours, Schools Must Consider Equity; Quello Center Report Reveals How Ignoring Deficiencies in Student Internet Access Contributes to Performance Gaps

As the number of cases of COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus) multiplies, and the length of school closures increases, school districts are struggling with the feasibility of providing students with online learning opportunities.

In the rush to plan for online education hours, schools must consider equity and the quality of Internet access that is available to their students. A new report from Michigan State University’s Quello Center reveals the challenges schools face if they plan to move online:

1) Home Internet access is the great unknown.

“We know that there is a serious gap between what official government statistics tell us about broadband availability and the actual experience on the ground,” said Professor and Quello Center Director Johannes M. Bauer, Ph.D.

In an effort to improve on available data, a first in Michigan and the United States study, the Quello Center, collaborating with Merit Networks, and Michigan school districts, surveyed 3,258 students in grades 8-11. The research team distributed in-class, pen-and-paper surveys in 21 predominately rural Michigan schools, looked at student PSAT and SAT scores, and examined home Internet speed test data.

Results show that the most rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged students are least likely to have broadband Internet access at home. Only 47 percent of students who live in rural areas have high-speed Internet access, compared to 77 percent of those in suburban areas. Of those who do not have home access, 36 percent live in a home with no computer and 58 percent live on a farm or other rural setting.

“The only way for school districts to know who has home connectivity is for them to survey parents” said Quello Center Associate Director for Research Keith Hampton, Ph.D., who is a professor in MSU’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences.

Schools should proceed cautiously when collecting this information.

“Students are generally unaware of why they don’t have Internet access at home. It might be because their families can’t afford access, because parents don’t recognize the need, or because service providers do not have an infrastructure in place, even for cell phone access, which can be the case in rural areas,” he said.

“Asking parents about their Internet access and the devices they own can be a difficult subject, it can reveal income inequalities and family choices that not all parents feel comfortable sharing with their child’s teacher. To get reliable information, it is important that schools follow best practices for how they survey parents.”

2) Not all access, or all devices, are equal.

Reliance on a cell phone alone for home Internet access has as negative an impact on student performance as having no access at all.

The report found that students who rely on a cell phone for Internet access at home, those with no access and those with slower access are less likely to collaborate or seek academic support online from their peers and teachers. It also takes longer for students to complete assignments.

The report found that the students without Internet access and those who depend on a cell phone for their only access are half a grade point average below those with fast access. This gap in student performance exists regardless of differences in socioeconomic status, such as student race and ethnicity, family income, or parental education.

Students who are able to access the Internet on their cell phone struggle to utilize the resources available on the Internet, whether due to slow connectivity, the small interface, or caps on data use from local service providers.

“It is wrong to assume that since most have a smartphone, students have sufficient access,” said Bauer. “It turns out that this is not the case. Those who have only cell phone access perform as poorly as those who have no Internet access at all.”

“Students with appropriate devices can still benefit from cell phone hotspots. However, such interventions need to be implemented with support from local service providers. Users may quickly exceed their data allowance and the addition of many new hotspots in a local area can create data bottlenecks on cell phone networks, affecting connectivity for everyone in an area” said Bauer.

3) Not all students are digital experts (and neither are their teachers or their parents).

The results show that students who rely on a cell phone only, or have no home Internet access, had a gap in skills that was similar to the gap in digital skill between 8th and 11th grade students.

“Digital skills are related to proficiency in a range of domains beyond simple technology use, including language and computation. Better home Internet access contributes to diverse technology use and higher digital skills,” said Hampton.

“Students without home access and those who rely on a cell phone will have less prior experience with online learning and will need considerable additional support to be successful if a school’s curriculum moves online.” Students with Internet access have substantially higher digital skills, and these skills are a strong predictor of performance on pen-and-paper standardized tests, such as the SAT, PSAT 10 and PSAT 8/9.

“We found that students with even modestly lower digital skills perform a lot worse on the SATs,” said Hampton. “We measured digital skills on a scale from 0 to 64. The average score was around a 30, but a student who performs modestly lower in digital skills (13 points or one standard deviation) scores about 7 percentiles lower nationally on the SATs. That is true for standardized test scores across all grades, not just the SAT.”

“Before moving testing online, teachers and schools need to be aware that students who have not had home Internet access or exposure to many devices at home will struggle with digital skills” said Hampton.

The report finds that students with Individualized Education Plans (IEP) are more disadvantaged in digital skills than other students.

4) Schools should ask these questions before delivering online learning.

Before replacing school contact hours with an online curriculum, schools need to survey parents about the Internet access and devices they have at home. Below are some best practices and questions that schools should use.

Survey by email, but follow-up by phone.

Most schools have an existing email list that can be used to contact parents with a survey. Send a link to a standard set of questions administered using a Web based form. A Web based survey can be less threatening, making it easier for parents to reveal accurate information about home Internet access and devices that might be related to family income. Parents may be reluctant to reveal this information over the phone to a teacher or school administrator. Many families without home Internet will still have an email address, but follow up with phone calls and by mail to fill in the gaps due to nonresponse. In some households, English will not be the parent’s primary language and a student may need to help complete the survey.
Do you have high-speed Internet access at home?

Schools need to identify students that do not have fast Internet access at home. Students who rely on a cell phone alone will experience significant gaps in performance and will have fewer digital skills. Students in low income situations are more likely to experience instability as a result of the household’s ability to regularly pay for Internet and cell phone plans. Some Internet providers are offering trial access and temporary relief from data limits, schools need a plan in place to monitor changes in student’s Internet access.
What devices do you have at home?

Do students have access to their own computer, laptop, Chromebook or tablet? Students in households where they share devices with parents and siblings will have less time to spend online. Identify households that have devices, but the devices do not work, or where they have problems accessing video or other content online. Students in households with too few devices, too old or inoperable devices will need additional support.
Does your child spend significant time in another home or away from home?

Students who split their time living with parents in multiple households may not have the same level of Internet access or access to devices at both locations. Parents may also be struggling to provide childcare during the COVID-19 crisis, students may be spending time in the homes of grandparents, neighbors, babysitters, and in other locations. Districts need a plan to accommodate change in students’ daily situations.
Is someone available to help your child online?

Launching an online curriculum in response to a crisis is not the same as typical online schooling. Highly motivated families are not self-selecting to participate. Parents have varying levels of digital skill and interest in working online with their children. Students in single parent homes, and those with parents who are still working outside the home, are less likely to have support available to get online and use content.
Do you have the resources you need?

Districts should use any contact with parents as an opportunity to provide support. As COVID-19 progresses, students and their families are more likely to encounter the illness, some will be sick, many will have close contacts that are sick, some may have experienced a loss. For many families, schools provide children with healthy meals. Remind parents of opportunities to access free or reduced priced meals for their children. Self-isolating, the need for social distance, and the economic challenges of responding to COVID-19 will place many families under increased stress. As teachers have increased contact with parents and students at home, they should be aware of their responsibilities and the resources available pertaining to domestic violence and substance abuse.

Digital inequality will become more apparent, as more and more families cope with the changes facing society during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was been declared a national emergency in March.

Ensuring that students have sufficient access to the Internet and digital devices to continue learning is more important than ever before.

For more information, visit: quello.msu.edu/broadbandgap

By Melissa Priebe and Dr. Keith Hampton

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags: Broadband Gap online learning online teaching

The Urgent Need to Move Schools Online: Four Things Your School District Needs to Know Before Taking Action