Using & Teaching Educational Technology
Does ICT make a difference?
By Terry Freedman
Wed, 23 Mar 2005, 10:27

An article in the UK's Daily Telegraph recently caused a flurry in ICT circles. Reporting on a research study undertaken in Germany, the article claimed that computer use doesn't boost student learning. It stated that the analysis revealed no link between computer use in schools and a student's learning of basic skills, such as maths or reading. In fact,the researchers found that the more access students had to computers at home, the lower they scored on tests, in part because the devices distracted them from their homework. This would have been dramatic enough, but coming as it did on the heels of an announcement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer that more money was to be made available to schools for computer equipment, the effect was quite dramatic: forums not just in the UK but also in the USA were buzzing with this bombshell.

But what did the study really say?

The first point to note is that the the study was published back in November -- 5 months previously. For some reason*, it took 5 months for the story to appear in the press. Perhaps that isn't of monumental importance in itself, except possibly as a warning to not always believe everything you read as far as academic research is concerned. Newspapers' function is to summarise the news, and perhaps to sensationalise it. There is nothing sensational in an announcement about something which happened almmost half a year ago, while summarising academic research is fraught with problems, because there are often so many caveats. This paper is no exception.

Here, then, is a bullet point summary of what it found. As you'll see, it's not as clear cut as the newspapers would have you believe! All I've done here is to summarise the main findings. You'll need to look at the paper itself (see the end of this article) for the methodology, analysis and possible explanations of the findings.

• Evidence on the relationship between computers and students' educational achievement is misleading, because computer availability and other characteristcs tend to go hand in hand. This applies both at home and school.
  
• Simply having computers at home seems to distract students from learning, but using computers in constructive ways partly compensates for this negative effect.
  
• Students who never use computers or the internet at school show lower performance than students who sometimes use computers or the internet at school. But students who use them several times a week perform even lower. The authors of the study suggest reasons for this: again, the "correct" explanation is not immediately obvious.
  
• Computer availability at school is not related  to student performance in maths and reading, whilst at home computer availability shows a strong statistically significant negative effect. Note that this is after taking into account the fact that better computer resources usually means that other resources are better as well.
  
• Students with internet access at home do better in maths and reading than those without internet access at home. Additionally, the more students use email and the internet, the better their performance in maths and reading.
  
• Finally, students that have educational software at home perform statistically significantly better in maths, but there is no real effect on reading.

The original paper referred to in the article can be downloaded from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=619101

* The mystery has now been solved! Lucy Crighton, of LTScotland, has emailed me to say:

Dear Terry,

Thanks for this article
I just wanted to add that the reason this was in the news now was that the authors gave a presentation at the annual conference of Royal Economic Society in Nottingham on 23rd March  http://www.res.org.uk/society/annualconf.asp

Lucy is the NGfL information officer for Learning and Teaching Scotland. For great resources, visit: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/

© Terry Freedman Wed, 23 Mar 2005