New technologies and improved school results: disappointment

Article last edited on May 19, 2016 by Admin

When new technologies are used in the classroom, their impact on student performance is nil or quite low, at best. New technologies are of little help in bridging the skill gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

In 2012, 96% of 15-year-old students in OECD countries reported having a computer at home

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have revolutionized almost every aspect of our private and professional lives. If students are unable to navigate a complex digital environment, they will no longer be able to participate fully in the economic, social and cultural life of the world around them. Those responsible for educating today’s “connected” learners face a number of complex issues, ranging from information overload to plagiarism, and protecting children from Internet such as fraud, privacy breaches and online harassment, to the choice of a suitable and appropriate media menu.

We expect schools to teach children to be thoughtful consumers of Internet services and digital media, helping them to make informed choices and avoid harmful behaviors, while raising awareness about the risks to which children are exposed on the Internet and the means of avoiding them. This report presents an international comparative analysis – the first in this field – of students’ digital skills and the learning environments designed to develop them.

It reveals the huge gap between the reality of our school and the promises of new technologies. In 2012, 96% of 15-year-old students in OECD countries reported having a computer at home, but only 72% reported using a desktop computer, laptop or tablet at school, and in some countries , less than one in two students said they were in this situation.

 Mixed effectiveness of ICT on academic success

Moreover, even when new technologies are used in the classroom, their impact on student performance is mixed, at best. Students who use computers moderately at school tend to do slightly better in school than those who use them infrequently. But on the other hand, students who use computers very often at school obtain much lower results in most areas of learning, even after controlling for their socio-demographic characteristics.

In addition, according to the results of the PISA survey, countries that have made significant investments in ICT in the field of education have not recorded no noticeable improvement in their students’ performance in reading, mathematics and science.

Another observation – perhaps the most disappointing in this report – is that new technologies are not of much help in bridging the skills gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.. In a nutshell, ensuring that every child acquires a basic level of literacy and math skills seems far more useful in improving equality of opportunity in our digital world than expanding or subsidizing access to high-tech devices and services.

Last but not least, the PISA survey reveals – and few parents and teachers will be surprised – that students spending, on an ordinary weekday, more than 6 hours on the Internet outside of school are particularly likely to report feeling lonely at school, arriving late to class or skipping days of class in the two weeks prior to the survey.

One possible interpretation of these findings is that developing deep conceptual understanding and thinking requires intensive teacher-student interactions – a valuable human engagement that technology can sometimes distract us from.

Another interpretation could be that we have not yet mastered enough the type of pedagogical approaches that allow us to take full advantage of new technologies, and that by simply adding 21st century technologies to 20th century pedagogical practices, we are not only diminish the effectiveness of teaching. When students use their smartphones to copy and paste ready-made answers to questions posed to them, their intellectual abilities are unlikely to be enhanced.

An intelligent practice of ICT in pedagogy

If we want the intelligence of students to be more than that of the search engine of their smartphone, we must reflect more deeply on the pedagogical practices that we use for their instruction. Technology can make it possible to optimize teaching of excellent quality, but it will never be able, however advanced, to compensate for teaching of poor quality.

This report leaves many questions unanswered. The impact of technology on the educational offer remains sub-optimal, due to the possible overestimation of the digital skills of both teachers and students, the naïveté of the design and implementation of strategies in this area, poor understanding of pedagogy, or the overall poor quality of educational software and courseware.

How many children would choose to play a video game if it was of the same quality as the software found in many classrooms around the world? As the results of this report highlight, the connections between students, new technologies and learning are neither simple nor given in advance, and the real contributions that ICT can make have yet to be realized and fully exploited. to teaching and learning.

However, we must not give up in the face of these observations. Education systems need to find more effective solutions to provide educators with learning environments that help develop 21st century pedagogies and equip children with the 21st century skills they will need to succeed. in the world of tomorrow. Technology is the only way to maximize access to knowledge. Why should students settle for a textbook that is already two years old in print, and perhaps ten years old in design, when they can have access to the best and most up-to-date textbooks in the world?

New technology and access to resources

Equally important, new technologies allow teachers and students to access specialized resources well beyond what textbooks can offer them, in multiple formats and without any constraints of space and time or almost. New technologies offer excellent collaborative platforms for knowledge creation, through which teachers can share and enrich their educational resources.

And perhaps most importantly, technology can be used to support new pedagogies that place learners at the heart of active learning, providing tools for inquiry-based learning methods and collaborative workspaces. Technology can thus enhance experiential learning, foster project-based and inquiry-based teaching methods, facilitate hands-on activities and collaborative learning, enable real-time formative assessment, and support learning communities. and teaching, offering new tools such as virtual and remote labs, highly interactive non-linear courseware based on state-of-the-art instructional design, sophisticated experimentation and simulation software, social media and serious games . To realize the promise of new technologies, countries need a compelling strategy to build teacher capacity.

And policymakers must redouble their efforts to garner the support needed to achieve these goals. Given the uncertainties that accompany any change, educators will always opt for maintaining the status quo. If we want to mobilize support for a school that is more open to new technologies, we must put in place better strategies, both to communicate the need for change and to mobilize support for it. We need to invest in capacity building and change management skills, collect reliable monitoring data and share it with relevant institutions, and provide sustainable funding for all of these efforts. Finally, it is crucial that teachers become committed actors of this change, by participating not only in the implementation of technological innovations, but also in their design.

Text and file: – Andreas Schleicher (Directorate for Education and Skills OECD / PISA)

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