New research in the latest issue of Education Next does an elegant job of capturing the perils of ed tech.

Payne Carter and her colleagues examined the performance of West Point sophomores in a core economics course. During spring and fall 2015, the researchers assigned participating class sections to one of three groups: technology-free (no use of laptops or tablets during class), technology-at-will (students could use what they liked, as they liked), and tech-limited (tablet-only with restrictions that made it tough for students to text, shop, or update social media).

What did the researchers find? On the three-and-a-half-hour final exam—which included multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions—students in the technology-free group fared best.

Will today’s frenzied enthusiasm for computer-assisted “personalized learning” will lead us to heedlessly charge into some all-too-predictable pitfalls, fueling one more cycle of ed tech faddism and disappointment?

Read the full article Frederick M. Hess about education technology on American Enterprise Institute