The Influence of Technology on the Academic Achievement of Students with Low Socioeconomic Status

Abstract:     
The accessibility to information is a powerful tool and today we find that new technology is being introduced into the classroom daily. There is an achievement gap that has many faces in education but the income gap has by far limited the access to this technology to low-income communities. A survey was conducted to explore low income student’s access to technology in the school and home. The instrument was administered to six Upward Bound Programs obtaining nearly 300 respondents. The Upward Bound Program is a federally funding program designed to services low income students to prepare them for college success. This study extracted a cluster of survey questions the specifically related to technology usage and analyzed the data to find those students the utilized the technology for school project performed higher. These results offer tremendous support to additional support to increase technology access to low income schools.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 14

working papers series