
Computers 'do not improve' pupil results, says OECD - wj
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34174796
======
nv-vn
I'm honestly not all that surprised, seeing as nearly every "technology in
education" initiative really just amounts to using iPads for virtual
textbooks. If schools used the technology to enrich education (specifically
where it would be useful rather than just every single class) then at the very
least it would be helpful in teaching new skills. However, treating computers
as a magical gateway to better educations will never accomplish anything and I
fail to comprehend how people thought it would be in the first place.

~~~
radmuzom
On a similar note, people seem to think that internet access will magically
allow people to lift themselves out of poverty in developing countries. I
personally find this idea to be pretty stupid; just because you have the sum
total of the world's knowledge available to you (a paraphrased quote from the
article) does not mean you are going to do anything with it or you can do
anything with it.

~~~
flohofwoe
Probably not for the majority, but for the people who _want_ to learn new
stuff the internet is invaluable. I learned programming as a kid in the 80's,
and the amount of time I spent only with finding and obtaining information is
mind-boggling. Even in the early 90's if you wanted to get the official OS
documentation for e.g. the Amiga you had to order them as several kilograms of
dead tree from the States.

~~~
sulam
So, 15 years ago I traveled to Senegal to help evaluate how the Internet could
be useful to them, economically speaking. Before my trip, I was imagining
things much like you're describing here. What I saw on my trip was fairly eye-
opening.

First of all, in much of the country basic services like electricity and
running water cannot be taken for granted. Phone service is available -- for a
price paid by the minute to some equivalent of a local entrepreneur who has
invested money into getting a mobile phone plan and has some means of charging
/ powering the equipment (solar was the typical method, although I saw more
primitive techniques as well). Internet access was generally many miles away
in a regional capital, which is probably an all day trip for someone walking
or on a horse (cars are for the wealthy). When you get there, access is very
expensive.

I'm assuming things have gotten better in the last 15 years. For instance
mobile phone penetration was already dramatic when I visited and can only have
improved since then. However literacy was a serious problem -- you have to be
able to read in order to make sense of almost anything on a computer, and in
Senegal at least just knowing French is an elite signifier since most speak
Wolof. Very few people were fluent English speakers -- I effectively had to
learn pidgin French just to have conversations with the local telecom
employees, although thankfully most Internet-specific technical terms were
just directly taken from English.

In Dakar (the capital city) things were very different. It was pretty much
what I imagined a typical city in Africa to be like -- and Internet access
there was still expensive but in the realm of affordable. University students
got some sort of access that was reasonable, although the pipe out of the
country was pitifully small at the time (we had more bandwidth for our office
than the whole country had in 2001).

The really interesting thing was that no one could figure out how to make
money off Internet access other than Internet cafes and connecting people to
the very large number of Senegalese who live outside the country. I imagine
the remittance market is huge now. However things have changed, it almost
certainly hinges on the extreme motivation people there have to better their
lives. They will move heaven and earth to make a buck -- SV entrepreneurs
could learn a lot from the drive on display everywhere I went. If you can
imagine a way to make money from a situation, they were way ahead of you.

One last thing -- Senegal is considered one of the African success stories,
generally speaking. It is relatively democratic, has a growing economy
(without all the problems that come with having oil deposits) and has been the
recipient of decades of development funding. _Many_ countries in Africa are
worse off than Senegal, and I would imagine the snapshot I got in 2001 looks
like utopia to them now.

~~~
eru
Thanks for the write up!

------
alialkhatib
Kentaro Toyama talks about education and the failed promise of the OLPC
program and other technological endeavors in education in _Geek Heresy_. His
thesis is that technology "amplifies" the characteristics in society and self.
If you have an underperforming school with ill-equipped or overwhelmed
instructors, technology won't fix these issues. But in education research,
where studies very carefully select a field site, you don't see experiments
involving problem schools; you find experimental deployments in idyllic
settings, with instructors who are extremely competent, and the researchers
might even take a relatively hands-on role to ensure the technology gets used
as desired by the protocol of the study.

In one chapter he points out that studies such as the OECD's tend to find
middling results (as this one seems to, although I see more explicitly
negative conclusions, like that students do _worse_ with technology in some
circumstances) mainly because you're studying students from across all
schools; look at the successful schools and see how technology affects them,
and he seems to argue that you'll find those students make even greater leaps
over the underprivileged students.

His bigger point is that technology's benefit is contextually determined by
human factors, and that we need to understand the cultures in which we hope to
use technology to benefit the members of that culture. Throwing tablets,
laptops, or smartphones at everyone won't magically make the world a better
place. It's a good read (so far, at least).

Also, I'm getting more and more annoyed seeing news outlets publishing
summaries of third party studies without linking to _anything_. The BBC don't
even link to the OECD's homepage, let alone the study they ostensibly
published.

------
analog31
I've got two kids in school (grades 8 and 10, relatively affluent district in
the US), and I'm not shocked by this result. Anecdotally, whatever the
possible upsides of computer use are, they are mitigated by some severe
downsides:

* While promising the potential to be a learning tool, the computer is also an addiction. I've observed that it's almost impossible for some kids to manage their time, and to maintain their focus, while doing lessons on the computer. This has been a _huge_ setback for one of my kids. Fortunately, math is still done on paper, so he gets something out of that.

* I've looked at the online lessons. My impression is that the effort of programming the interactive environment for online lessons tends to limit the breadth and depth of those lessons. Math instruction has abandoned proofs. A huge amount of the computerized lessons are busywork.

* There's no limit to the amount of homework that can be pushed on kids.

This is nothing new. Roughly 30 years ago I had an internship at an
educational computing center that had almost every kind of computer and
educational software title in a demo lab, for teachers to try out. The vast
amount of apps amounted to glorified flash cards.

How great it could actually be is lost on the teachers. Instead of working
through canned lessons, or surfing for stuff to paste into a report, kids
could explore "real" software such as (just listing some of my favorites),
Scratch, iPython Notebook, Arduino, etc.

~~~
alfapla
Humanity is suffering from a collective ADD epidemic under the spell of
computers and internet and children are getting the worst of it. Computers are
the last thing that kids under 12 need in a classroom. Teach them something
that involves quiet focus, like 19th century cursive writing.

~~~
icebraining
_Humanity is suffering from a collective ADD epidemic_

No, it's not. The US and a few other developed countries are suffering from an
epidemic of ADD _diagnoses_. Unrestricted computer use is certainly not a good
education policy, but there's no evidence that it causes ADD.

~~~
prodmerc
Oh, it causes ADD, alright. Without a proper way to use it, the Internet just
leads people to jump between pages, bits of information and topics, which
often devolves in distraction on the many entertainment bullshit resources out
there...

You can't read a book properly when you know you can just jump to the middle
or the end to see the most interesting bits.

~~~
icebraining
"People reading on the Internet are easily distracted" is not the same as
"having ADD".

~~~
prodmerc
Well, if it looks like ADD and acts like ADD, it is ADD.

Asperger's, for example, has been pushed under "autism spectrum disorder". And
Pluto is not a planet.

I could see Internet overload/distraction be diagnosed as some ADD-like
disorder, or the main cause of it...

------
MarcScott
From a quick scan of the actual OECD report, it is quite clear that the
authors are far less certain of the general conclusions than than the reporter
from the BBC.

"With this data, patterns of correlation can be identified, but these must be
interpreted carefully, because several alternative explanations give rise to
similar patterns"

and

"Nothing guarantees that students who are more exposed to computers can be
compared to with students who are less exposed, and that the observed
performance differences can be attributed to such differences in exposure."

and

"Non-random selection and reverse causality thus plague within-country
analyses, even after accounting for observable differences across students and
schools."

[http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-
Management/oecd/educati...](http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-
Management/oecd/education/students-computers-and-
learning_9789264239555-en#page1)

------
sytelus
There are several scenarios where computer use would not just be great but
accelerate learning process:

-Teaching about planets, universe, Big Bang through interactive simulations

-Virtual interactive dissection for biology class

-Interactive geometry for understanding proofs

-Playing with molecular structure of material

-Interactive virtual model of steam engine and internal combustion engines

-Interactive excercise for basic arithmetic and trignometry

-Learning about WWII with photos, animations on map, graphs, data, videos.

I would have truely loved all these to be there in my school years. The key is
that you need a _great_ software that is targeted towards specific parts of
topics. Remember _interactivity_ is the key and only computers can offer that
so cheaply and effectively even to the most disadvantaged students in remotest
part of the world.

Instead of all these, when I hear "Tech for Education" it usually means,
replacing books by ebooks, submitting homework electronically, ask questions
in class chat rooms, recording activities in e-log and so on. Those things are
triviality with negligible benefits towards actually understanding the subject
- more likely negative benefit as it just adds on distraction. No one wants to
do real tech in Ed like above examples because it's hard, requires lot of
expensive talent and risk taking. Building chat rooms for class shouldn't even
be called "tech in Ed", IMo.

Unfortunately schools are blowing 100s of million on just that and governments
and philanthropists are happy to shove their cash in to creating ever more
advanced chat rooms and classroom management systems rather than create actual
interactive content that helps understanding of the subject.

It would have been nice if study pointed this out instead of denouncing use of
computers in education straight up.

PS: No one should compare student performance with Shanghai or Mumbai. Those
places have extra-super-heavy emphasis on passing exams and memorizations. You
will find tons of students there who can acurately list down every single
important date for WWII and without pretty much any understanding of dynamics
that caused Holocast or even Holocast itself.

~~~
vixen99
"There are several scenarios where computer use would not just be great but
accelerate learning process:"

And dumb teachers across the world have missed all that, have they? Before
spending taxpayers' money, how about some evidence that it's cost effective?

------
paulojreis
"Computers in education", at least in my country (Portugal), was never about
improving pupil results or _education_ per se.

"Computers in education" is all about clientelism; filling the pockets of a
selected few which produce mediocre technology, a quid pro quo between politic
executive power and the private sector.

------
buffoon
I agree.

My daughter has just hit secondary school in the UK. She was disappointed to
find that they rarely touch a computer.

What they did do is on day one of science drop her a proper lab notebook and
start talking about the scientific method and proper experimental recording,
in mathematics they started talking about propositional logic and in RE they
talked about logical reason. They're also not allowed to read eBooks; only
paper ones.

I'm shitting myself with joy if I'm honest that they didn't stick them in
front of a Flash game like they did in primary school and assume that was the
end game for technology in education. They learned close to nothing and we had
to do all the educating.

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michaelbuckbee
The real promise of education technology isn't to plop computers in front of
kids and hope they do better it's to get persistent, dynamic, individualized
curriculum for every student.

Right now a kid that scrapes by with a D in 3rd grade English starts up at the
same place as the kid that sat around bored because they'd read all the
required reading the first week.

TL;DR We need a Young Ladies Illustrated Primer -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age)

------
aik
Interesting. I'm most fearful that this will be interpreted as "technology is
bad! Keep it out of schools!" \- rather than "ok, now we have learned that
randomly situating computers throughout a school may not be the right approach
to introducing new technology into the school in an attempt to improve
outcomes", and possibly, "should we revisit the outcomes that we are seeking
in this new world?"

------
JDDunn9
What about the benefits to teachers? Taking a test on a computer won't make
you perform any better, but it frees up a lot of the teacher's time grading,
which is often spend "after hours".

------
candu
"The role that the computer can play most strongly has little to do with
information. It is to give children a greater sense of empowerment, of being
able to do more than they could do before. But too often, I see the computer
being used to lead the child step by step through the learning process."

[http://www.papert.org/articles/ACritiqueofTechnocentrism.htm...](http://www.papert.org/articles/ACritiqueofTechnocentrism.html)

------
fsloth
For most applications computers do not make activities higher quality - they
make them faster. And they need software to do this. History has shown that
really good novel software is extremely hard to come by.

Before being productive on a computer a person has to learn to think and how
to be creative. And after that one needs good software.

Sure, 1 in a 1000 kids is a born natural programmer and given a computer will
make programming his/hers lifelong passion. For the rest of the crafts -
unless exceptional applications are available like Photoshop and
(Cintiq/Surface) for art, Scratch for learning programming, etc - traditional
analogue learning materials may be superior.

------
WalterBright
This has been known for years. The only thing computers really help are
learning disabled kids.

It's like exercise. You can attach a motor to the exercise machine to do the
work for you, the work gets done, but you don't get any stronger.

The same goes for learning. Learning requires effort. No effort = no
improvement. Jobs called computers a "bicycle for the mind". Biking will get
you further than jogging, but not stronger.

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gaius
Clifford Stoll was right. Read Silicon Snake Oil and marvel at his prescience.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I assume this article is a summary of his argument, seems more wrong than
right with the benefit of hindsight:

[http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-
nirva...](http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-
nirvana-185306)

Quote: _" Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog
shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets
over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts.
Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in
an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a
trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network
is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."_

(I work in education, and the software is mostly pretty bad, since its
basically "enterprise software", but I don't blame technology as such)

~~~
gaius
Stoll makes a convincing case that between the ages of 6 and 16 computers are
harmful to education.

------
twhb
It’s not the tool that yields results, but how you use it.

~~~
tdsamardzhiev
Agreed! Giving them hammers won't improve the outcome either.

------
Rainymood
When I was little, I remember this racing game and this block building game.
You did multiplications (like 6x7) and if you got it correctly you would get
another block in your wall. It was really addicting to be faster than you
little friends.

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rusabd
Stradivarius violins in schools won't help if teachers are not musicians. The
whole notion of professional "teachers" instead of professionals is broken. My
best teachers were practicing scientists, programmers and crafstmen

~~~
ZenoArrow
There's an element of truth to that, but I'd argue an effective teacher in a
classroom environment also needs to know how to communicate to a group of
kids. I've had teachers who clearly had an interest in a subject but weren't
able to get it across (for reasons that were a little hard to judge). Arguably
that's the sort of thing that teacher training should give teachers a chance
to refine, though I don't know if that's the sort of skill that teacher
training focuses on at the moment.

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tudorw
I would have liked to see some data on the accompanying human resources and
expenditure, if technology investment is taking from human resources
investment then it's not a surprise that the results are poor.

------
hmate9
I think they have found this result because technology is not used correctly
in schools. These "edtech" softwares are very weak most of the time.

------
musesum
What the "International Tests" are optimized for?

I wonder if, a century ago, the increase use of automobiles led to a
measurable decline in buggy handling skills.

