[Educators] World Bank study on computer use, February 2009

Caryl Bigenho cbigenho at hotmail.com
Sat Mar 14 00:50:28 EDT 2009


Hi Yama,

This study seems to be a different one from the one circulating on the olpc-sur list from the BID.  Similar results, but interesting stats on computer use by the students in several Latin American countries.  It was released in March and concentrated on Uruguay for much of its data.  The WB study seems to concentrate on Colombia.

The BID study says students who feel more confident of their computer skills also do better in their subjects (tests?).  Is this a "chicken and egg" situation? Probably!

Caryl

Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:41:06 -0500
From: yama at netoso.com
To: educators at lists.laptop.org
Subject: [Educators] World Bank study on computer use, February 2009









Earlier this year it was announced there was a momentous
World Bank study to be published. We  were warned it might be quite
negative to the OLPC project.



If this is that study, I find it very tame, nothing new really, and
nothing we cannot improve - if we want and dare to see reality.



http://tinyurl.com/d3gtto

http://econ.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64165259&piPK=64165421&theSitePK=469372&menuPK=64166093&entityID=000158349_20090211111507



yes, computers in education are mostly useless, doh, unless they are
integrated to the existing process.  Why don't people focus on that, I
don't know. (BTW, to integrate them to the teaching process, supporting
the teachers' work, is the approach we expect to use within OLE
Bolivia) (another BTW, talking with an international expert of UNICEF
in Bolivia I was told she had never seen something like that kind of
integration, ever, anywhere - go figure, seems so
obvious!)



Just to spell out what I am talking about right here,
constructivism/ionism is not connected to the
educational process.



My emphasis,

from the abstract,
                                                       

           "Overall, the program seems to have had little

effect on students’ test scores and other outcomes. These

results are consistent across grade levels, subjects, and

gender. The main reason for these results seems to be the

failure to incorporate the computers into the educational

process."



from the text,

" The main reason for these results may be the implementation

of the program. Surveys of both teachers and students suggest that
the program increases

computer use among students and teachers by a surprising small amount,
and most of the

use of computers by students is for the purposes of learning to use a
computer rather than

studying language.    Additionally, the extra computer use reported by
teachers is

concentrated in the lower grades with older students’ teachers
reporting almost no

computer use in both groups."



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