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“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Matoaca High School just outside Richmond, Va., began eliminating its five-year-old laptop program last fall after concluding that students had failed to show any academic gains compared with those in schools without laptops. Continuing the program would have cost an additional $1.5 million for the first year alone, and a survey of district teachers and parents found that one-fifth of Matoaca students rarely or never used their laptops for learning. “You have to put your money where you think it’s going to give you the best achievement results,” said Tim Bullis, a district spokesman.

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

At other times, she uses the wireless Internet access in the college's classrooms to do some online shopping or chat using instant messenger. "If it's material that I know, most of the time I will surf the Internet a little bit," says Ms. Mei, a junior.

"They claim that they're taking notes — and they may well be," he says. "But it still is annoying."

"A couple of them have said, 'I don't have any paper,'" says Mr. Aylesworth. He had them borrow some from classmates.