p2pnet.net News:- Is the Net becoming the 21st century way for kids to cheat at school?

Almost all American teenagers log on, and almost all of them also do so at school, representing growth of roughly 45% over the past four years from about 11 million in late 2000.

But 37% of US teens (defined as between 12 and 17) believe their peers are now going online to cheat, says a new Pew Internet & American Life Project report.

Between October 26 and November 28, 2004, 1,100 parent-child pairs were sampled and, “For a growing portion of the online teen population, schools have become an important venue for internet use for a significant number of teens,” says Pew.

Eighty-seven percent use the Net, translating to about 21 million people, 78% (or about 16 million) of whom say they surf at school and about one in five (18%) who log on from multiple locations list school as the place where they go online most often, up from 11% in December 2000.

But while the stats suggest greater internet penetration and use in schools, they also show 32% of all teens don’t use the internet at school at all, “despite the fact that 99% of public schools have access to the internet,” says Pew.

Few rely on school Nets
“Interestingly, less than 1% of online teenagers who go online from school say that school is their only location of access,” it goes on.. “This means that while many teenagers do go online at school, very few rely exclusively on their school’s internet connections. These teens find additional locations outside of school to connect online, even if they are not wired at their own home. For the teenagers who reported that they go online at school, 87% also go online from their home, 75% go online from someone else’s house, 61% go online from a library, and 11% from a community center of some kind.”

Of teens who don’t go online at school, 23% live in homes with incomes of less than $30,000 per year while 31% live in a household with an income of $75,000 or greater and, “This would suggest that the reason that some teens do not go online at school is not necessarily economic,” says Pew.

“Perhaps these teens choose not to go online at school because their school’s access is inconvenient due to old machines, filtering, or limited availability of computers.”

Eighty-six percent of teens n the survey, and 88% of online teens, believe the Net helps teenagers to do better in school, and 83% of parents of online teens agree.

But 37% of teens said “too many” teens today use the Net to cheat on schoolwork, compared to 27% of parents who say the same thing.

The Net, school and cheating
In December 2000, 18% of teens said that they knew someone who’d gone online to cheat and notably, “in our recent survey there is practically no difference between teens who are online and those who are not as to whether they believe too many teens cheat using the web,” says Pew, going on:

“There is an even more substantial difference in opinion between parents and teenagers about the need for children to use the web by the time they have started school. One-quarter of teenagers agreed that if a child is not using the internet by the time they start school, they will fall behind their peers while 44% of parents believed the same thing.

“While most parents and teens view the internet as a helpful academic tool, parents are more likely to believe that children must be familiar with the web by the time they start school.”

IM and school work
Three-quarters of online teens (about 16 million) use instant messaging and 78% say they use IM from time to time to talk about homework, tests or schoolwork.

Online girls are more likely to do this than online boys, and older girls (15-17) are the most likely of all to do this. And teens with broadband connections at home are more likely than dial-up internet users to use IM this way, says the study.

Use of the Net to search for colleges and other schools
Fifty-seven percent of online teens have gone online to get information about a college, university, or other school they were thinking about attending and 45% of online adults have done the same thing.

“Among teens, girls are more likely to search for schools on the internet than boys, 61% to 53%,” Pew adds.

“The likelihood that a teenager has searched online for school information increases with age. About a quarter (27%) of 12-year-old internet users have done this, compared with 85% of 17-year-old internet users. There is no significant difference between the percentages of teens who have looked for such information with dial-up connections and those with broadband connections.”

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See:-
report – Data Memo, August, 2005

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