A new survey to be released today shows that students with home internet access are becoming increasingly disappointed with their online experience at school. As today's youth continue to embrace the internet, their rising expectations for school connectivity have resulted in a near-doubling of dissatisfaction in school internet access among nine- to 17-year olds since 2000, the survey's authors say.

"Children, Families, and the Internet 2003," produced by market research firm Grunwald Associates, used a combination of online and telephone surveys to poll thousands of American children ages 6 to 17 and parents of children ages 2 to 17 about their internet habits, attitudes, and interests. When students go online from school, researchers found, many are disappointed in the experience.

Despite figures from the National Center for Education Statistics suggesting that 94 percent of schools now connect to the internet using broadband, a whopping 76 percent of kids with broadband internet access at home say their home connection is faster than their school connection, according to the survey. Even a majority (62 percent) of students with dial-up modem connections from home perceive their home connections to be about the same or faster than their school connections.

Both kids ages 6-17 and their parents also expressed rising levels of frustration with the amount of time students are getting online at school. Nearly half of kids with home internet access (49 percent) and more than a third of their parents (34 percent) say kids are getting "too little time online" in their schools, the study says.

This represents a doubling of dissatisfaction among parents of nine- to 17-year olds and a near-doubling on the part of their children since 2000, according to the survey. In 2000 only 27 percent of nine- to 17-year olds thought they were getting too little time online in school, compared with nearly half today, while the percentage of parents of nine- to 17-year olds who are dissatisfied with their kids' online time has risen from 17 percent to 34 percent in that time.

"I think it's pretty clear that while national connectivity initiatives have had an impact, they haven't the ubiquitous connectivity that some national policy makers assume," said Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald Associates, in an interview with eSchool News. "Students' real experience using the 'net is very different than the image painted by some of the superficial data that are out there."

One reason for students' disappointment is that many school networks still have trouble dealing with contention, Grunwald said. Put another way, school networks often can't handle many simultaneous users.

But infrastructure is only part of the story, Grunwald added: "Even more important is educators' ability to thoughtfully integrate technology into instruction--and, of course, the content [provided by] internet services themselves is important. All of these need work."