Dividing the Digital Divide: Instructional Use of Computers in Social Studies

This article explores the impact of social class setting on the instructional decisions made by four high school social studies teachers in utilizing computers in their classrooms. First, teachers in different settings had dissimilar views of the educational futures of their students. Second, the students with the highest and lowest social class status used computers more for school assignments than other students. Third, teachers in the two higher social class settings provided instruction that gave their students more access to higher status knowledge than did the teachers in the two lower social class settings.