Impact of ICT use on educational performance

The question the top-dog politicians nowadays ask is the impact of ICT on educational performance. Especially in the school sector, this has been the trendy question since a few years, when the policy makers realised that they want to see some return on their investment (i.e. all the hardware put in schools). My favourite EUN report on recent research is The ICT Impact Report (01/2007).

This week at the OECD's New Millennium Learner conference South-Koreans presented another interesting study towards this direction. Prof. Heo's presentation is available here, check the pages from 20 onwards for the results. The study included 10% of the 10th graders in South-Korea (1071 students, random sampling). The design of the study looked at the use of ICT

• Place: in-school and out-of-school use of ICT
• Purpose: learning vs. entertainment use of ICT
• Context: individual use vs. social use of ICT

Educational performance was divided into:

• Cognitive domain
• Affective domain
• Socio-cultural domain
  

Significant impact was found on educational performance with:

• Out-of school ICT use
  
• ICT use for learning
  
• ICT use in individual context

Note, in-school use did not yield any significant impact :/ More interestingly, out-of-school use of ICT for learning purposes had a positive correlation (r=0.520, p= 0.00) with cognitive domain of educational performance, which shows good news for informal context of learning.