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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.092 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".