How achievement and technology interact

Raising Achievement 
and . . .

Attendance

Behaviour / Inclusion

Community and Parents

Early Years

Ethnicity

Gender

Literacy, numeracy and SEN

Out of School hours activities

Teaching and Learning Strategies

Technology

ICT in Primary and Secondary Schools  

This document reports on the state of ICT in UK schools over the period 2005-2007. In its finding Ofsted notes that:- 

• Schools need better guidance on evaluating ICT development and its impact on whole-school improvement.

• Schools need more help with assessing pupils’ ICT capability and identifying underachievement. In particular, there is a need for support in developing higher order capability.

• Training is needed both for subject leaders and for teachers and teaching assistants.

• The potential for ICT needs to be recognised and built into school improvement planning to reduce the variability in the quality of pupils’ experience.

• Pupils’ use of ICT inside and outside school needs to be known about

The importance of support, guidance and vision from senior management is also stressed. My own personal experience would support this: without this it is difficult to develop ICT adequately, and frustrating for teachers at the chalkface who might have vision but are unable to exploit this because of tardy, unimaginative senior management.

Technology Counts: A Digital Decade  

This is the tenth Technology Counts report. The section on research into technology's effectiveness is useful and reiterates the belief first noted back in the early days of ed.tech. in schools back in the 1980s: “When you’re working with technology, it cannot just be dropped in school” notes Glen Bull, a professor of instructional technology at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. And yet although anecdotal evidence suggests here in the UK that maybe some senior management types have taken this on board, ed.tech. "success" is sometimes still measured by numbers of computers in classroom rather than by how successfully the tech is being used.

Executive Summary here.

The Becta Review 2005: Evidence on the progress of ICT in education  

In this report, Becta note that, "Among the most evident improvements over the last few years are those to learners' access to ICT and to overall institutional provision. There has also been a sharp rise in levels of teacher/lecturer confidence – in terms of both general confidence and the use of ICT in learning and teaching."

And yet. also, "many institutions, especially smaller ones, are struggling to embed the use of ICT to serve their educational goals."

This picture has been familiar in ICT in education for the last 25 years. A minority of institutions are able to make good and effective use of ICT to improve students' learning but there are still barriers to institutions' embedding of ICT into their work in a sustainable way.

Becta note that, "Barriers to progress include limitations in infrastructure access and reliability, and limitations to professional expertise in the workforce." That this is still the case after 25 years of educational ICT is scandalous. There seems no easy solution.

ICT in schools- The impact of government initiatives five years on  

From Ofsted, 2004. Amongst the main findings Ofsted note that competence of staff in ICT has increased dramatically, but that there are continuing difficulties of access for individual departments in secondaries. Also, between schools there is wide variation in pupils' experiences.  Further, the training programme funded by the NOF continued to disappoint. Where schools provided their own training for staff, this was generally much more effective than the NOF-funded training.

As yet, the government’s aim for ICT to become embedded in the work of schools is a reality in only a small minority of schools.

There is more. Worth a look.

ICT resources and school standards   

These reports (on the BECTa site) note that, "In schools that provide good ICT learning opportunities, pupils achieve higher results in the core subjects of English, mathematics and science at Key Stage 3 and at GCSE level in general. In the overwhelming majority of cases, as the quality of ICT learning opportunities improves so does pupil achievement, in particular when ICT learning opportunities are judged to be good or very good. Similarly, schools that make good use of ICT within subjects at Key Stage 3 and GCSE level achieve better results than those who do not, especially where such schools have access to good ICT resources."

Children's Emerging Digital Literacies: Investigating Home Computing in Low- and Middle-Income Families  

From the U.S. Centre for Children and Technology, this 2002 one-year comparative study of children’s use of computers in low- and middle-income homes explored the digital divide as a literacy issue, rather than merely a technical one.

Three elements were identified that have an impact on how children use their home computer:

The length of time children had a computer at home; 
A family’s ability to purchase stable Internet connectivity; 
the number of computers in the home and where they are located.

The study also identified five elements of children’s social environment that shaped their computing:

Parents’ attitudes toward computer use;
Parents’ own experience and skills with computers;
Children’s leisure time at home;
The computing habits of children’s peers;
The technical expertise of friends, relatives, and neighbours.

Technology Counts 2003  

This is the 2003 Special Report from the US Education Week. The focus on high-stakes testing and the possible role technology has to play in this testing is particularly relevant in the UK with the current disquiet over high stress SATs. Possible future use of technology in UK testing has already been mooted. Read this report for some of the issues involved.

Getting the Most from technology in Schools  

This U.S. West Ed research brief outlines how technology might benefit students the most. It notes again the benefits of both students and teachers having access to computers away from school. In addition the need for teachers to learn more about how to integrate new technology in their lessons rather than just learn how to operate the technology is stressed: a lesson the UK Government continually fails to grasp.

The Digital Disconnect: 
The widening gap between Internet-savvy students and their schools  

This report, from the U.S. Pew Internet Project, highlights the inability of schools to incorporate exciting and achievement-raising Internet use into the curriculum. Students say they face several roadblocks when it comes to using the Internet at schools. In many cases, these roadblocks discourage them from using the Internet as much, or as creatively, as they would like.

The situation in the UK would seem in many cases to be similar, with the dead hand of unenlightened and nervous senior management stifling innovative student and teacher use of the Internet. Schools should be making their facilities available much more widely so that the digital divide, between those with Internet access at home and those without, does not grow ever wider. until senior management cease focusing on hardware and start concentrating on curriculum use of the Net then achievement will continue to be unfairly depressed.

Bringing a Nation Online  

This July 2002 report, from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Education Fund and the Benton Foundation, notes that many Americans are still on the wrong side of the technology divide. It identifies these groups and shows how schools and libraries provide valuable access for these groups. Many parallels with the UK situation.

Are we there yet?  

According to a survey on school technology by the U.S. National School Boards Foundation, nearly 30 percent of school leaders think that one in five students soon will receive a substantial portion of their instruction over the Internet. There is still plenty of work to do in installing computers and wiring schools, but that's not all that needs to be done. According to the survey, many teachers still are unprepared to use technology in class, and district leaders report that the Internet remains primarily a research tool, not a forum for interactive teaching, learning, communicating or collaborating.

These findings are not unlike those in the UK where the potential offered by NOF ICT training to remedy the situation seems to have been squandered once again by a Government which seems unaware of how people (teachers and students) learn best. Top-down, mechanistic instruction rarely motivates.

Wired Up Communities  

This is the website of the UK Government's Wired Up Communities initiative. This programme will see computers installed in nearly 12000 homes and schools in pockets of high social deprivation.

Training and support will be offered to those receiving equipment, and a specially designed website will be set up to encourage participants to access learning and employment opportunities on the web. A range of technologies will be tested, including broadband and narrowband access, satellite communications and digital television.

Some of the students on the RHS Raising Achievement project, and who live in the Whitebirk area of Blackburn, will benefit from this pilot. See also the DfES Research Brief 252  for more details and this DfES Press Release .

Closing the Digital Divide  

This report from the UK Government's Policy Action Team 15 (PAT 15) addresses the access and use of ICTs by people living in poorest neighbourhoods. The PAT found that whilst there are a large number of projects and initiatives already in operation or planned, there are gaps in provision and barriers still exist which prevent people in deprived neighbourhoods accessing ICTs.

(PAT15 is one of 18 Policy Action Teams set up by the UK Prime Minister to advise him on how best to help people living in deprived urban areas.)

Digital Divide Network  

This excellent U.S. site says that it:-

"looks at the causes and effects of the divide from four distinct angles: technology access, literacy and learning, content, and economic development. In each of these areas, we pay particular attention to the role of local individuals and organizations when it comes to bridging the divide. In many cases, the stories featured on DDN come directly from the people working on the divide at the local level."

It features a wealth of stories, reports and analysis concerned with the digital divide and ways of overcoming it.

Access and Use : DfES Research Brief 252

This survey was designed to discover the uptake of, attitudes towards and barriers to use of ICT among different groups. 

The Power of the Web for Learning  

This is the December 2000 report of the Web-based Education Commission to the President and Congress of the United States. It emphasizes the role that the internet can play in the emancipation of the individual learner. It notes that,

"The regulations that govern much of education today were written for an earlier model in which the teacher is the centre of all instruction and all learners are expected to advance at the same rate, despite varying needs or abilities."

Read this and reinforce your belief in the child as the centre of the educational process.

Evaluation of Pioneer and Pathfinder UK Online Centres: Follow-up Study

The aim of the UK online centres is to bridge the gap between those in society who have access to and are able to use information and communication technologies (ICT) competently, and those who do not.  The Government’s target is to provide 6,000 centres.  The centres are intended to be located in places people visit every day, with convenient opening hours to offer easy access. The key success criteria are the extent to which the centres increase ICT awareness, ICT skills and people’s participation in local communities. 

Perhaps read in conjunction with the US "Losing Ground Bit by Bit" report and the UK's  "The Secondary School of the Future " from Becta, both referenced below.

Switching on Learners in the middle years - A pedagogy of engagement through learning technologies   

This report, presented at the National Middle Years of Schooling Conference, Redesigning the Middle Years March 28th – 29th March, 1999, noted that, 

"Young adolescence is a critical time in the lives of students. In a period of extreme physical and emotional upheaval, engagement in schooling inevitably decreases. Introducing learning technologies into the learning environment enhances interest in learning, making it more student-centred, collaborative and encouraging cooperative, creative problem solving."

Losing Ground Bit by Bit: Low-income communities in the Information Age. 1998 report from the Benton Foundation

This report, in Benton's "What's Going On" series exploring public interest issues in the Information Age, examines the technology gap in low-income communities, assesses what barriers are slowing the spread of new technologies to the underserved, and describes some of the most promising efforts to produce a more equitable distribution. This U.S. report raises and describes issues also of concern here in the U.K. and which the RHS Project tries to address in its own very limited way. Links between UK technology access and achievement are noted in the Becta report  The Secondary School of the Future.

The Secondary School of the Future  

A preliminary report to the DfES by Becta February 2001. 
Becta is carrying out research for the DfES utilising data from Ofsted concerning the relationship between the ICT resources of schools and the academic achievement of pupils within those schools.

The Future is in the Margins: The Role of Technology and Disability in Educational Reform  

The purpose of this U.S. paper is to provide an overview of the role of technology and disability in education reform.