NPR – Anya Kamenetz
“A group of recent studies on technology in education, across a wide range of real-world settings, have come up far short of a ringing endorsement. The studies include research on K-12 schools and higher ed, both blended learning and online, and show results ranging from mixed to negative. A deeper look into these reports gives a sense that, even as computers become ubiquitous in classrooms, there’s a lot we still don’t know — or at least that we’re not doing to make them effective tools for learning. First, a quick overview of the studies and their results: Last fall, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development published its first-ever, and one of the largest-ever, international analyses of student access to computers and how that relates to student learning. (The OECD administers the PISA test, the world-famous international academic ranking.) For this report, the researchers asked millions of high school students in dozens of countries about their access to computers both in the classroom and at home, and compared their answers to scores on the 2012 PISA.”(more)