HE advent of the Internet, and the Web in particular, has upended a few traditional notions about who is educating whom. A study made public yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project concluded that students tend to be far more adept than their teachers when it comes to finding creative educational uses for the Internet.

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"Many schools and teachers have not yet recognized — much less responded to — the new ways students communicate and access information over the Internet," the study's authors wrote.

Douglas Levin, a senior researcher for the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research firm in Washington that conducted the Pew study, said that "for many schools, the bulk of assignments are not particularly inventive" — like assigning students to go to specific Web sites to find answers to particular questions. "If I had to judge the cost-effectiveness of the use of technology in schools by those uses," he said, "I'd be very disappointed."

The study was based on focus-group interviews with 136 middle school and high school students in Washington, Detroit and San Diego, along with 200 additional essays written by students around the country. One focus-group participant, Matthew Smith, 17, who will be a senior this fall at San Diego High School, said he was particularly struck by the mundane use of the Internet as a textbook.

"Physics teachers use
physicsclassroom.com and say, `Go there and look up such and such lesson and I'll quiz you tomorrow,' " he told a reporter. "I don't consider that creative, or even educational."

In contrast, he said he admired the inventiveness of a science teacher who led an online study group that convened before quizzes to review material. "Teachers don't use those methods more because they have a lack of faith in the Internet," he said.

Both Mr. Levin and students who took part in the study said the teachers who were most sophisticated about the Internet encouraged students to use it to share information with one another and correspond with experts outside of the school, or set up an interactive Web site for the class.

Foreign language is a good example of a subject that lends itself to creative use of the Web, Mr. Levin said. "Instead of reading passages in their textbooks about conversations in cafes made up 30 years ago, now they go and read the foreign language newspapers online, which makes it much more relevant to their lives," he said.