Do Tablet Devices Improve Academic Performance? A Causal Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many schools worldwide have implemented or plan to use tablets as an educational tool to enhance students’ academic achievement. Going beyond correlations and associations, this study investigates the impact of eBook tablets on students’ grade point averages (GPAs) using matching methods. Using survey data from two major universities in the Midwest, we find that providing eBook tablets to university students improves their academic performance. The impact of the eBook tablets is more pronounced when tablets are provided to all the participants in the sample. Based on the potential means outcome, the result further demonstrates that students who did not initially receive tablets in both universities would have benefited from having a tablet. Implications for practice or policy: This research estimated a 0.15 GPA improvement among the students who were provided tablets. A marginal increase may beneficially affect students who narrowly miss qualifying for scholarships or fellowships. A 0.15 GPA each year could move a student up a whole letter grade over the four years. Methods utilized demonstrate a causal effect.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".