Information technology is great, but it may not be making kids smarter, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which has an authoritative program for assessing school-education quality, and has published a report showing that increased computer use in classrooms leads to lower test scores.
The researchers compared data from 2009 and 2012, under the Program for International Student Assessment.
As you might expect, the number of computers in schools and households increased in those three years, as did the time kids spent online. In OECD countries and in Russia, a student spent, on average, two hours a day online in 2012, and 25 minutes of that time was at school. That figure undoubtedly has increased since then.
The use of computers for schoolwork has increased, especially in Western countries. Education systems in Australia, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway were the leaders in integrating tech.
Yet, there are some outliers: Japan, China and even tech-loving South Korea, where the share of students using computers at school declined to 42 percent in 2012 from 63 percent in 2009.
They may be on to something. The OECD study found that the use of computers was negatively correlated with improvements in student performance on math tests.
And this doesn’t apply only to math: In countries with higher numbers of students who frequently browse the Internet for schoolwork at school, reading performance tends to improve more sluggishly than in others, or even to worsen.
The decline in performance becomes especially noticeable in countries where students often use online chats for schoolwork. They “may be missing out on other more effective learning activities,” the report suggested.
In most cases, teachers are better off sticking to imparting universal concepts and reasoning skills. Students will figure out how to apply them online, or in any other environment.
It’s appropriate that schools should try to prepare children for life in the 21st century, but there’s no way they can be sure life won’t change as dramatically in the next decade as it did in the last 20 years. It makes sense to keep to basics. •
Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist.
