Working on computers does not improve academic performance

The report is based on the results shown by students from around the world in the PISA 2012 (International Program for the Assessment of Student Educational Achievement). Here are some conclusions¹.

• In itself, the presence of a large number of computers in the school and free access of students to modern technologies does not at all guarantee an improvement in academic performance and an increase in the quality of education. Teachers teach, not computers.

• Students who use computers “very often” in school perform worse.

• Those who use computers at school moderately often (once or twice a week) show slightly better results than those who use them very infrequently.

• In those countries that have invested heavily in information technology development, students on PISA exams have not shown any visible improvement.

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• In many countries and cities that show the best results in PISA tests (South Korea, Shanghai), information technology is used in schools very moderately. Moderate use of computers in education does not prevent, for example, Singaporean schoolchildren from showing excellent results in computer literacy tests.

• There is no country where student achievement has improved due to the widespread use of the Internet in schools.

• In Australia, New Zealand and Sweden, where the Internet is most widely used in school education, reading and reading comprehension scores have declined significantly. As for Spain, Norway and Denmark, they remained unchanged there.

Andreas Schleicher, director of education at the OECD, emphasizes that these results do not mean that information technology should be abandoned. It is only important to find them really effective application. As an example, he cites digital textbooks, the information in which can be updated as needed.

¹ «Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection», OECD, Paris, 2015.