Educational studies have shown that the home learning environment and increased parental involvement improves student achievement. Additionally, a recent US Department of Education study has shown that on-line learning and blended instruction – a combination of in-classroom and on-line – teaching can be more effective than face-to-face instruction.
A 2006-7 study by the City’s Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications showed that low-income NYC residents lag far behind their middle- and higher-income counterparts in home broadband adoption rates, due to multiple factors, including affordability of service and/or computer equipment, lack of digital literacy skills, and perception that broadband adoption is not valuable to their lives and needs. The NYC Connected Learning model is a holistic solution that confronts all these obstacles to broadband adoption simultaneously, and is thus most effective in bridging this kind of “digital divide.”