OECD: Sole access to computers doesn’t improve learning

However, it said that students who frequently use computers at school “do much worse” than those who rarely use them.

“If you look at the best-performing education systems, such as those in East Asia, they’ve been very cautious about using technology in their classrooms”, Mr Schleicher said.

But the initiative has not seen any increase in grades in reading and mathematics, despite 89 per cent of students gaining access to school laptops.

“We all hope that integrating more and more technology in school is going to help us actually to enhance learning environments”.

The OECD’s education director Andreas Schleicher says school technology had raised “too many false hopes”.

The report, from the UK’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, found that the effect of technology on students’ worldwide standards tests (PISA tests) performance-and even “digital skills”-was “mixed at best”.

There’s an interesting thing happening in countries where kids are the most comfortable with computers: they aren’t reading all that well.

“Technology can have a huge impact on student achievement and engagement because it is often what students choose to use every day to communicate, learn, create and collaborate with each other”, Hal Perry, PEI’s Education, Early Learning and Culture Minister, said last week. And all online activities-including browsing or emailing at school-seem to hurt students’ reading once they become a couple of times or twice weekly habits.

In line with these findings, students in Korea and other Asian economies, where computers are less integrated into the learning process than in Australia or northern Europe, perform better even on computer-based assignments, including what PISA calls “digital reading” – dealing with online content that includes hyperlinks.

Part of the problem is that schools haven’t yet figured out how to use technology to make a difference in learning, according to the report.

None of this is to say that computers aren’t helpful within a classroom. He called on governments and departments of education in countries to “ensure that teachers are at the forefront of designing and implementing this change”.

While Irish teenagers rank highly when it comes to reading, both in print and online, a mastery of web browsing is attributed to an additional strength in assessing pages or screens of text and filtering relevant and trustworthy sources from among a large amount of information.

There is no simple message about technology use in schools from this OECD report – and one of its main conclusions is unsurprising: “In the end, technology can amplify great teaching, but great technology cannot replace poor teaching”.

“We’re preparing our children for jobs that don’t yet exist”, said Mr Morris, head of Ardleigh Green junior school in the London Borough of Havering.