Do students with access to technology learn better than without?

This is such an obvious question to ask and fits alongside all kinds of other questions about teaching and learning - for example does setting work better than mixed ability? do girls learn better in mixed gender groups? is there a right way to teach reading? It feeds into the argument put forward by critics that education researcher have lost focus on telling us what works in teaching and learning.

To the lay observer medicine seems to provide the appropriate analogy. We know for example a drug works if administering the drug (the intervention) results in better outcomes for those patients taking it (the experimental groups) than those not taking it (the control group). The ‘gold standard’ for this kind of testing is the blind test so that patients in the control group are administered a placebo and patients do not know to which group they belong. This reduces the risks of unreliable data.The double blind test is one in which the administrators of the trial do not which group is which either.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate these kinds of conditions in the context of teaching and learning except in the most trivial of contexts. The concept of creating blind trials is almost unimaginable particularly in relation to ICT. Imagine giving one group access to computers and the other no access (as has been tried in several trials). This allows interesting comparisons to be made but everyone involved will know to which group they belong and data will necessarily be ‘contaminated’. This kind of trail raises ethical questions too and further practical difficulties - in what sense can the control group be kept away from computers. More fundamentally it can further be argued that computers are not an independent variable in the same way as medical treatments are – their use is necessarily ‘socially constructed’ . For example it has been frequently observed that where technology is introduced there might be a dip in teacher confidence and performance as they become distracted by learning to use the technology. And is the field of technology so wide that asking about its impact on learning is like asking about the contribution of books to knowledge. Finally, there is the question as what are we expected to measure in the way of learning outcomes. If traditional pen and paper testing you might be missing just what computers can bring to teaching and learning; if you use say tests of information management then you are prejudicing the control group.

To reduce some of the above difficulties there is perhaps value in exploring data retrospectively, for example how have learners in schools with high access to technology achieve in relation to those in low access schools. This reduces the risk of ‘bias’ but creates new difficulties. How can high access and low access be identified and how can extraneous variables such as class, gender, size of school be controlled? Further what is being explored in this kind of research - it might be that the schools which have invested most in technology might be ones led particularly energetic leadership teams – technology is simply a ‘placeholder’ for some other characteristic. Of course researchers go to great lengths to minimise these difficulties and Becta has been confident of saying that technology has had an independent and positive impact on learning.

My own view is that surely we should explore an ‘analytical’ rather than causal justification for using ICT. This will involve saying what has ICT allowed to happen (say accurate measurement of data over time; access to large sets of data; easy amendment of texts) and arguing why this has been important for learners and teachers.

For more on this however try

Underwood, J. (2009) The Impact of Digital Technology: A review of the evidence of the impact of digital technologies on formal education. Coventry: Becta (Click here)

Eng, T-S (2005) The impact of ICT on learning: A review of research, International Education Journal, 6, 5, 635-650.

An outsider view of the case for large scale randomised trials is put by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian (31 July 2010)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/31/ben-goldacre-teaching-reading-shootout