The Effects of ICT on Achievement: Criticizing the Exclusion of ICT from World Bank’s Education Sector Strategy 2020

Abstract

If there are areas that have received significant impacts of ICTs, education is one of them as ICTs have stimulated major differences in the teaching approaches and the ways students learn (Yuen, Law, & Wong, 2003); however, World Bank unexpectedly excludes ICT from the key focus areas in their ESS 2020, a guideline that may be adopted by developing countries for improving national education policies and agendas. Thus, by using hierarchical linear modeling and the latest PISA results, the present study examines the effects of student’s use of ICT and school’s resources on achievement in the third world countries. The analyses disclosed that (1) students’ frequencies of ICT use outside of school as well as at home were negatively related to student achievement, (2) school’s resources were positively related to student achievement on science at school level and cross?level interactions, (3) the availability of ICT for students to use at school was also significantly associated with student achievement. The exclusion of ICT from World Bank ESS 2020 does not show that ICT no longer plays significant role in student learning process and no longer has a positive effect on student achievement; rather, ICT is probably falling out of favor because of the litigation surrounding it nowadays (McGrath, 2012).