In her essay, Eliana Dockterman attempts to craft a new understanding of the role of technology in early learning, in an effort to persuade parents still hesitant to embrace the change. Dockterman uses facts, diction, and appeals to reason to convince her audience that early exposure to technology is beneficial.
Beginning with the counter argument, Dockterman relates to the readers the differing views of technology. Firstly, she cites the great amount of American children and teenagers who regularly use technology - between 27 and 52 percent - implicitly stating that eliminating technology in any meaningful way is wholly unreasonable. She then juxtaposes the views of American school districts, 80 percent of which plan on incorporating tablets into the curriculum, with
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The author uses the finding that kids who played puzzle games, "did 12% better on logic tests" to put the vague idea of 'technology' or 'games' into reality. Using logic tests as a reference for the audience demonstrates the concrete cognitive impact of early tech use. MIT's experiment using Civilization gives another view on educational improvements - students showed a greater interest in history, and their history reports improved. This puts the impact in different terms than just statistics, which are more objective, but harder for the audience to entirely understand. Learning retention rates are another way in which Dockterman surprises the audience. While traditional learning methods are never engaging enough for kids to retain more than half the information, using interactive tools results in a 90% retention rate. She succeeds in giving a new base understanding of technology's effects on learning, beyond the assumptions made by many parents, showing the huge disparity between it and traditional