Publication: Can Computers Help Students Learn?
Loading...
Published
2011-01
ISSN
Date
2012-08-13
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Policymakers and development experts seeking to improve the quality of education are interested in the role technology can play. Not only do they want to use technology to directly aid learning, but they also want to ensure that students in developing countries - and poor communities everywhere - get the same exposure, and same education benefit, from technology as do their counterparts in wealthier parts of the world. Bringing computers into the schoolroom is seen by experts as one way to do this. But just making technology available may not be enough. Policymakers and development experts need to know how to ensure the technology is used effectively. To assist educators, policymakers and education experts understand how technology may boost the quality of education; the World Bank supported a two-year study of a program in Colombia that places computers in public schools. The study failed to find that the computers led to any measurable increase in student test scores. Researchers suggested this could be because teachers and students mainly used the computers to learn how to use computers, instead of using them as a part of the teaching process. The results do not mean that computers and other information and communications technologies cannot raise educational quality. But it does offer a cautionary note to those seeking to increase the availability of such technology tools: being able to access technology is not always enough - people may also need training in how to use the technology to reach the stated educational goals.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2011. Can Computers Help Students Learn?. From Evidence to Policy; No. 4. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/10455 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Kenya(Washington, DC, 2022-10)Before the COVID pandemic, more than half of children in low and middle-income countries suffered from learning poverty: they either were out of school or failed to learn to read with comprehension by age 10. At the same time, numerous studies have documented serious challenges related to the quality of education services, particularly for those serving poor students. In a country like Kenya, for example, teachers exhibit low levels of content and pedagogical knowledge. Previous research has shown that highly structured teaching guides could improve literacy, but scripted lessons are not without critics, who worry that teachers will not be able to adapt content to student’s needs. In places where teachers may be less prepared to tailor high quality lessons to their students, however, scripting may offer a way to standardize a minimum level of quality at scale.Publication India(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07)In the first years of life, all children need healthy food, a clean environment, and stimulation to thrive and reach their full developmental potential. However, poverty prevents millions of young children in low- and middle-income countries from receiving adequate nutrition and stimulation. As a result, many disadvantaged children’s brain development lags behind that of their well-off peers, which can have lifelong consequences. Previous research from low-income settings has found that encouraging parents to play and interact more with their children can improve children’s brain development, with impacts that can last into adulthood. Delivering these parenting programs at scale and in a cost-effective manner, however, has been a challenge, in part because some of the most successful programs have been delivered through intensive and relatively costly home-based programs.Publication Rwanda(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11)Children need a safe, nurturing, healthy, and stimulating environment to thrive and reach their full potential. But millions of children living in poverty don’t receive enough stimulation or good nutrition in their first years of life, and poverty also makes them more likely to experience neglect and violence in the home. Domestic violence, however, is rarely addressed in programs promoting young children’s development, which also typically focus on mothers, with little attention on fathers. Previous research suggests home-based parenting programs can lead to positive improvements in children’s brain development. Can these programs be adapted to address family violence as well Can these services be effectively delivered through government social safety net programs which often target poor, vulnerable familiesPublication Armenia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04)More people around the world are dying from noncommunicable diseases than ever before. These diseases, which include cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, diabetes, and heart disease, prematurely kill more than 15 million people between ages 30 and 69 each year. Many of these health conditions also make individuals more susceptible to severe forms of other diseases like Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This study targeted adults between the ages of 35 and 68 in Armenia who had not been screened in the preceding year. The baseline data suggests this population was not economically secure: half of participants responded that their income was sufficient for basic family needs, such as food, clothing, and utilities, but not enough for big purchases like a car, while 35 percent responded that their income is sufficient for everyday food but not for clothes and other basic needs. More than half of those in the study were unemployed. This research finds that conditional incentives and personalized invitations can substantially increase screening for diabetes and hypertension for those who haven’t been recently screened. Further research may be needed to evaluate these interventions at scale.Publication Philippines(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11)The World Bank’s Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund supported a randomized controlled trial from 2015-2018 to assess the extent to which subsidized microloans can enable households to build and use improved toilets. The loans, which carried zero interest, included toilet installation and were offered to poor beneficiaries who also received sanitation behavior change promotion as part of a social safety net program. The large financial subsidy led to modestly higher coverage of improved toilets, better toilet quality, and greater satisfaction, while the small subsidy did not improve access to improved sanitation. Among those who took out the subsidized loans, 59 percent already had improved toilets, which explains the limited effects on improved sanitation and open defecation. Overall, these findings suggest that subsidy programs hold promise, but need to be better targeted.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Private Non-State Sector Engagement in the Provision of Educational Services at the Primary and Secondary Levels in South Asia : An Analytical Review of Its Role in School Enrollment and Student Achievement(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)Private (non-state) sector engagement in the provision of educational services at the primary and secondary levels in South Asia has recently undergone remarkable growth. This type of education comes in various forms, such as schools financed and managed by the private sector, schools financed by the government and managed by the private sector, private school vouchers, and tutoring outside the classroom. According to recent household survey data, almost one-third of school-goers aged 6 to 18 years in South Asia go to private schools, with a high concentration in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Data for India, Nepal, and Pakistan show that on average, private schools perform at least as well as government schools on student test scores, after controlling for socioeconomic factors, and they do so at significantly lower costs to society. However, student achievement varies greatly across schools of each type, with many weak private schools as well as strong government schools. Substantial, albeit indirect, evidence points to teacher behavior and accountability as an important driver of the effectiveness of private schools. In the long run, however, many factors may play important roles in sustaining the private sector's advantage. Another risk is that overall poor quality in a large government sector may set a low benchmark for the private sector. The findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of government regulations for private schools, given weak institutional capacity. Public-private partnerships with effective accountability mechanisms could leverage both equity and efficiency. Finally, it appears important to understand and customize teaching to the child's individual level.Publication Teaching Mathematics Effectively to Primary Students in Developing Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-12-30)This paper uses research from neuroscience and the psychology of mathematics to arrive at useful recommendations for teaching mathematics at primary level to poor students in developing countries. The enrollment rates of the poorer students have improved tremendously in the last decade. And the global Net Enrollment Ratio (NER) has improved since 2001 from 83.2 percent to 90-95 percent except in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Making teaching of math and other subjects efficient for the poor in developing countries is a great challenge, particularly in south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Many developing countries have explored new means of teaching math and other subjects. Mongolia changed its mathematics education, aiming to build a new set of priorities and practices, given the abandonment of earlier traditions. Similar to international trends of the time, South Africa in the 1990s extensively applied the constructivist learning philosophy which relied on exploration and discovery, with little emphasis on memorization, drill, In conformity with a belief that teachers could develop their own learning programs, there was virtual absence of a national or provincial syllabus or textbooks. Students were expected to develop their own methods for arithmetic operations, but most found it impossible to progress on their own from counting to actual calculating. This study integrates pertinent research from neuroscience and the psychology of mathematics to arrive at recommendations for curricular and efficient means of mathematics instruction particularly for developing countries and poor students at primary level. Specifically, the latest research in neuroscience, cognitive science, and discussions of national benchmarks for primary school mathematics learning, form the basis of our recommendations. These recommendations have a reasonable chance of working in the situational contexts of developing countries, with their traditions and resources.Publication Learning from Local Practices : Improving Student Performance in West Bank and Gaza(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06-12)The motivation for this study is to contribute to the preparation of the new Palestinian Education Strategy by shedding light on the school and classroom level factors that influence student learning, and to identify good practices that can be generalized from high-performing classrooms to those that need improvement. While most Palestinian children are in school, performance on assessments indicates that many of them are not learning as much as they could. This represents not only inefficiency in the use of public resources, but also a lost opportunity for individual students and the society as a whole. The current study was carried out by the Assessment and Evaluation Department (AED) of the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MoEHE) with technical and financial support from the World Bank. The analysis presented in this paper was prepared by the World Bank team as a complement to a previous paper prepared by a team of experts from AED. For the purposes of this study, schools were classified by student performance in TIMSS 2011 and the 2012 Palestinian national exams. Classroom and school-based tools were then used to gather information from both high and low-performing schools. A total of 122 public, private and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) schools were surveyed using four different instruments: (i) stalling's classroom observations; (ii) school leadership survey; (iii) teacher survey; and, (iv) school facilities survey, which are all provided in annex one.Publication The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education : Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia(2009-02-01)This paper presents the evaluation of the program Computers for Education. The program aims to integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a sample of 97 schools and 5,201 children. 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. Although the program increased the number of computers in the treatment schools and provided training to the teachers on how to use the computers in their classrooms, surveys of both teachers and students suggest that teachers did not incorporate the computers into their curriculum.Publication Uganda Student Assessment : SABER Country Report 2012(Washington, DC, 2012)In 2012, Uganda joined the Russia Education Aid for Development (READ) trust fund program, the goal of which is to help countries improve their capacity to design, carry out, analyze, and use assessments for improved student learning. As part of the READ trust fund program, and in order to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of its existing assessment system, Tajikistan participated in a formal exercise to benchmark its student assessment system under The World Bank's Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) program. SABER is an evidence-based program to help countries systematically examine and strengthen the performance of different aspects of their education systems. SABER-student assessment is a component of the SABER program that focuses specifically on benchmarking student assessment policies and systems. The goal of SABER-student assessment is to promote stronger assessment systems that contribute to improved education quality and learning for all. The importance of assessment is linked to its role in: providing information on levels of student learning and achievement in the system; monitoring trends in education quality over time; supporting educators and students with real-time information to improve teaching and learning; and holding stakeholders accountable for results. The SABER-student assessment framework is built on the available evidence base for what an effective assessment system looks like. The framework provides guidance on how countries can build more effective student assessment systems. The framework is structured around two main dimensions of assessment systems: the types/purposes of assessment activities and the quality of those activities. Assessment systems tend to be comprised of three main types of assessment activities, each of which serves a different purpose and addresses different information needs. These three main types are: classroom assessment, examinations, and large scale, system level assessments. This report focuses specifically on policies in the area of student assessment.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication The World Bank Group in Georgia, 2014-23(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-30)This Country Program Evaluation assesses the performance and effectiveness of the World Bank Group’s support to Georgia in achieving the country’s development objectives. In the decade leading up to the evaluation period, Georgia pursued economic reforms to attract critical investments for becoming a regional trade and transport hub. Ambitious economic reforms went hand in hand with efforts to improve human development and strengthening social protection systems. Growing geopolitical tensions and internal political polarization have challenged Georgia’s reform progress in recent years. The Bank Group’s strategy adapted well to Georgia’s development needs and was well coordinated with other development partners. It successfully employed a range of instruments to help increase competitiveness, growth, and job creation, and effectively contributed to improved infrastructure and increased trade by using programmatic and innovative approaches. The Bank Group’s regular investments in analytical work and the switch to results-based programmatic support helped improve the efficiency and effectiveness of education and health care systems. The IEG offers the following lessons based on the evidence and analysis in the Country Program Evaluation: (i) Prioritizing Bank Group support around the move towards deeper regional integration was an effective anchor for key economic reforms for economic convergence. (ii) Pursuing a selective and adaptive approach in a country with high implementation capacity and institutions, strong coordination among development partners, and access to a wide range of external resources can allow the Bank Group to exercise significant influence in areas of comparative advantage and global expertise. (iii) A stronger focus on outcome-based programmatic approaches helped to build local capacity and crowd-in partner financing.Publication Antidumping Mechanisms and Safeguards in Peru(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-07)Peru's experience in the application of antidumping and safeguard measures is characterized by a radical change in the philosophy and procedures of trade at the beginning of the 1990s, and by an increasing use of these mechanisms. Trade liberalization was accompanied by the liberalization of foreign currency transactions and of financial and labor markets. Also, the internal revenue administration was modernized, institutions for regulation and competition defense were created, and state enterprises were transferred to private owners or concessionaires. New laws and institutions were created to regulate markets, including INDECOPI, a novel government agency charged with antimonopoly regulation and consumer defense, and which houses the Antidumping and Subsidies Commission. This highly autonomous and technical Commission became the central player in the implementation of WTO rules and procedures for fair trade. Since the reform was launched, a total of 81 trade protection cases have been presented, of which 57 were followed by a dumping investigation. The application of antidumping duties was approved for 29 of the cases investigated. Only two cases of safeguard investigations were recorded, one of which (Chinese textile clothing articles) is still in the negotiation phase. This paper reviews that case experience in detail, concluding that Peru has clearly differentiated between unfair competition and dumping on the one hand, and damage and safeguards on the other, and has applied strict technical criteria to the former and broader political considerations to the latter. Despite recent indications of a partial retreat from those principles, the decade-old reform is expected to last.Publication 1 World Manga : Passage 1. Poverty - A Ray of Light(San Francisco: VIZ Media and World Bank, 2006)The first World Manga series offers a premise where the hero must grapple with social problems of a global magnitude that are set in the real world. Fifteen year-old orphan Rei survives by his wits and guts on the mean streets of the world. His fortunes take a strange turn when he meets a trainer wielding some powerful transformational magic who offers to coach him to achieve his dream of becoming the greatest marital artist in the world! But it seems Rei's trainer is more interested in developing his mind, spirit and ugh! Heart than his thrashing, raging, and fighting moves! The stakes get higher when Rei meets a young woman fighting just to survive! Can Rei meets vanquish the specter of poverty? This publication includes some of the following headings: poverty - a ray of light; HIV/AIDS - first love; child soldiers of boys and men; global warming - the lagoon of the vanishing fish; girl's education - life lessons; corruption - broken trust; and interview with the author of the first World Bank Manga (passage one to passage six).Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication FY 2025 China Country Opinion Survey Report(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-08-04)The Country Opinion Survey in China assists the World Bank Group (WBG) in better understanding how stakeholders in China perceive the WBG. It provides the WBG with systematic feedback from national and local governments, multilateral/bilateral agencies, media, academia, the private sector, and civil society in China on 1) their views regarding the general environment in China; 2) their overall attitudes toward the WBG in China; 3) overall impressions of the WBG’s effectiveness and results, knowledge work and activities, and communication and information sharing in China; and 4) their perceptions of the WBG’s future role in China.