Research to date on the impact of technologies on learning has never established that using a computer or any other technology improves learning. I have closely monitored the literature on teaching technologies since the bloom of computers in the classroom in the early 1980s and have yet to see a study that was without a fundamental flaw. Strange but true. Multimedia has become such a science that universities are now granting doctorates in what is essentially multimedia design and programming. Unfortunately, their graduates appear so narrowly educated that they know little or nothing of instructional design outside of that which is packaged in slick authoring systems.
Experimental design is a critical component of scholarly research.
It also appears to have taken a back seat to the latest fashions in media. Case in point. Throughout the first part of this century, some misled psychometricians revealed that, as indicated by a variety of instruments, members of lower socioeconomic status and members of certain racial groups were of inferior intelligence. These studies proved nothing and could have been avoided had they been properly designed. They were fundamentally flawed in that they failed to control for a host of environmental experiences and conditions that contribute to test performance of any kind, extraneous factors that could account for the observed differences.