Every three years, students around the world participate in an international assessment of their competencies in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy as part of the Programme for International Student Assessment, more commonly known as PISA. In 2006, schools from 58 countries were randomly selected to take part in the effort, overseen by the OECD, to test how well students can apply the knowledge and skills they have learned at school to real-life challenges. (When you read a press report about a given country being highly ranked -- or doing poorly -- in comparison to other countries on how its students do in reading, math, or science, quite often this a reference to the so-called 'league tables' that are published by the OECD in this regard.)
PISA provides a goldmine of data for researchers interested in many topics, and the OECD has just its analysis of Technology Use and Educational Performance in PISA, which notes that "OECD countries [here's the list of them] have undertaken significant investments to enhance the role of technology in education. What are the results of these investments? Are they fulfilling expectations? PISA 2006 provides a wealth of comparative data to begin answering these questions ..."
While the full report, Are New Millennium Learners Making the Grade?, is not available for free download on-line at this time, you can read an 11-page summary from here (in PDF) or a related earlier paper here (pdf, 2.3MB). This work, part of the OECD's initiative looking at 'New Millennium Learners (NML), is a follow-up to a 20006 study, Are Students Ready for a Technology-Rich World? What PISA Studies Tell Us.
(Side note: The recent event on '1-to-1 computing in education', featured on this blog here and here, was also part of the NML project.)
There is much food for thought in the 205 pages of charts, graphs, data tables and analysis contained in this eagerly anticipated report (even if, as the authors state, "data availability remains one of the main handicaps for understanding the role of ICT in education."). If there is a 'headline message' here, it is probably that:
One of the most striking findings of this study is that the digital divide in education goes beyond the issue of access to technology. A second digital divide separates those with the competencies and skills to benefit from computer use from those without.
More concretely,
even accounting for a student's socio-economic status, there is a significant correlation between computer use at home and educational performance, a correlation that does not appear for computer use at school. Some analysts have rightly pointed out that in a school setting what matters is the use of computer in the wider context of a particular educational strategy. According to this view, gains in educational performance would only appear in the presence of a successful educational strategy. Therefore, the amount of use, i.e. the time a computer is used, would not matter at all. This certainly makes sense from a strictly educational perspective, but fails to explain why substantial gains in educational performance are correlated with the frequency of computer use at home. This is even more striking in view of the mostly leisure or entertainment-oriented nature of computer activities performed by students at home.
Are New Millennium Learners Making the Grade? concludes by examining a set of policy implications, which appear (to me at least) relevant for all countries, not just those in the OECD:
- Raise awareness among educators, parents and policy makers of the consequences of increasing ICT familiarity
- Identify and foster the development of 21st century skills and competences
- Address the second digital divide
- Adopt holistic approaches to ICT in education
- Adapt school learning environments as computer ratios improve and digital learning resources increase
- Promote greater computer use at school and experimental research on its effects
This report provides a valuable service in providing hard data against which we can test the many hypotheses and claims put forward in this area -- even if, as with so much research into the impact of technology use in education, the deeper one delves, more questions are often raised than answered. I expect that the release of this valuable report will generate a lot of comment and discussion in the coming years, as its findings are circulated widely.
Visitors to this blog may also be interested in an OECD publication that came out late last year, the culmination of a multi-year OECD project on digital learning resources:
A few years ago, I put together a quick guide for infoDev cataloguing what the OECD was doing related to ICT and education. While a little out of date now, it still might be of interest:
Please note: The image used at the top of this blog entry of the Italian city of Pisa (seen from its famous Leaning Tower) comes from the Wikipedian Blorg via Wikimedia Commons and is used according to the terms of its Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.
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