I don't know about his personal beliefs, but I do think his science is suspect. It seems like he is appealing to a particular segment of public sentiment for personal gain. For example, he has not published any peer reviewed papers about his tech in education (EdTech) claims; it has only been published in his book which has been criticized for its conclusions. To me is seems like sloppy inference that he promotes by abusing his credentials as a scientist. If so, he is a truly abhorrent individual. As a scientist myself, I feel scientist have a duty to the public and humanity to act with integrity, and in the case of his claims about tech in education, it doesn't seem like he is.
To be clear, I am a data scientist but I'm a computational biology so not in the field of psychology or education. However, my critic of his research, which is also shared by his colleagues who are in his field, is claims are entirely the old "correlation is not causation" fallacy. I would even argue that it doesn't meet the standard of correlation because he doesn't actually have proper analysis to show longitudinal effects of technology use in education (EdTech).
I'll provide my assessment of claims. This gets technical, but this is exactly what he is hiding behind and using his real credentials as a scientist to help obscure. He has two actual pieces of data which both have a number of problems:
Data point 1: He analyzed an existing data set that shows that students using computers for more than 6 hours/day score 66 points lower (which he claims is two letter grades) than their peers with the lowest level of computer use (<1 hour/day) which represent the two extreme groups of this study. This claim has a number of problems: a) It is self reported by 15 year-olds; b) There is no inclusion of covariates or even an analysis of whether other factors also associate with these two groups (i.e. socioeconomic, lifestyle, environment, physical factors); c) He does even consider the other two intermediate categories of computer use in this study which was broken into Infrequent (<1 hr/d), Moderate (1-2 hr/day), Heavy (4-6 hr/d), Extreme (>6 hr/d). He only assessed Infrequent vs Heavy. d) There is no longitudinal analysis of this data. This study was conducted from 2000 to 2025, but he did not appear to assess how EdTech use changed over time, how achievement changed over time, or how time was distributed within his two groups. So the entire analysis comparing two groups of the most extreme computer use over 25 years.
Data point 2: He claims that EdTech produces a +0.29 effect size on test scores which is lower than the baseline of +0.40 you would expect if there is no tech and the teacher just shows up. So he admits EdTech improves test scores, but just not as much as what would occur without EdTech so it's a net loss. However, there are a number of problems with this claim: a) He does not calculate the baseline value; it was calculated by someone else and uses a different data set from the one he got the +0.29 EdTech effect size from. In fact, the benchmark data was collected from 1993-2008, but the EdTech effect size was calculated from studies published between 2000-2025 so each study could have used data collected anytime before that date range so these are very different sets of data that don't even correspond to the same time period. b) The +0.29 EdTech effect size is a synthesis of meta-analyses where he took a weighted average of each effect size reported in 398 different studies. This approach is a standard meta-meta-analysis, but it matters what studies were included and how they were weighted. The problem here is that he included studies that used a huge range of EdTech approaches (Computer aided instruction, fully online instruction, laptops for each student, etc) and just combined them all to get one aggregate score.
So in the end he has two actual pieces of problematic data, and to explain that data he just tells a story using actual but unrelated science studies that looked at the effect of tech on memory, "off-loading", and distraction. Thats it: no actual correlation just a story about how his two numbers relate to other studies about tech that used different data sets and different participants (not necessarily even kids). This is why he wrote a book and has no peer-reviewed papers because IT IS NOT SCIENCE! It is a story masquerading as science.
I'm now super irritated I wasted so much time to figure out how baseless his claims are. It's not even like some of his recommendations are wrong or bad, but it's all based on a story. Why would you start trying to change the way children learn based on feeling? I think people agree that education needs to be improved and that tech can be detrimental, but he could be doing long term harm to education if people believe him which is ironically what he is claiming to be trying to fix. The cynical part of me fears the
