Classroom computer spending showed no clear link to test scores

The short answer

A country that spends heavily on classroom computers should not expect that spending alone to lift reading, maths or science scores. The OECD's 2015 report on technology in schools found the relationship between access and achievement was, in its own words, mixed at best. What separated stronger and weaker performers was not whether a school had computers, but whether students could use them to find and evaluate information.

What the evidence says

The OECD report, published 15 September 2015, drew on the 2012 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tested 15-year-olds across dozens of countries and paired the assessment with a questionnaire on computer access at home and school. The report set out to examine the relationship among computer access, computer use in classrooms, and performance on PISA's reading, maths and science tests, and it paid particular attention to the digital divide by socio-economic status, gender, location and school type. Writing on the OECD's own education blog the day the report launched, education director Andreas Schleicher summarised the headline finding directly: even though computers are common in daily life, where they are used in the classroom their impact on student performance is, in his words, mixed at best.

For context

The report's more useful finding sat inside its digital reading data rather than its spending figures. The OECD's own analysis of that same PISA round found that the strongest performers in a separate digital reading test, Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong-China, Japan, Canada and Shanghai-China, were largely the same countries that led on print reading, and that students in Singapore, Australia, Korea, Canada, the United States and Ireland showed the strongest web-browsing skills, meaning they followed relevant links and abandoned dead ends efficiently. Across OECD countries, roughly one student in ten showed limited or no productive browsing activity at all, a sign of missing basic digital skills rather than missing hardware. This is a correlational picture built from one assessment cycle, not a controlled trial of specific school technology programmes, so it cannot say that any single classroom tool caused better or worse results.

A practical next step

Before treating a new device or app as the answer to a learning problem, you could ask what specific reading, evaluating or writing skill it is meant to build, and how a teacher or parent would notice whether that skill is improving.

• Does this technology replace a proven teaching method, or sit alongside it?
• Can the child find, judge and use relevant information online, separate from how much they enjoy the device?
• What would count as evidence, over a term, that the tool is helping rather than merely occupying time?

The report's caution has aged well: a decade of further edtech spending has not settled the question of which tools help which students learn, which is exactly why it remains worth asking before buying.