New technologies in traditional classrooms - what exactly is going on?
 Professor Angela McFarlane asks the questions and considers where we might find evidence for the answers.
The government so far has invested well over two billion pounds in new technologies in education. The intervention has been done with unprecedented speed and there are high levels of expectation about the outcomes. How can we find out about what all this means? Is ICT transforming education?
There are many small-scale national and international studies reported in journals but it is difficult to pull them together and provide a meaningful overview. There are gaps in the research data; apparently identical studies produce conflicting results; the studies are all carried out in rapidly changing times. We are experiencing difficulties of finding evidence of the effects on learning in school.
The IMPACT2 study of 60 schools, funded by the DfEE, ended in July 2002. This research provided no consistent relationship across the board between lots of use of ICT and value added in terms of attainment.
The role of out-of-school use of computers in learning is increasingly interesting to research. IMPACT2 found that 75% of primary pupils and 90+% of secondary in the sample had a computer at home. Use at home seemed to correlate to improved attainment in school.
It seems likely that the type of involvement in ICT is all-important.
IMPACT2 provided plenty of evidence that something interesting was going on but we don't know exactly what and so there was no basis for giving advice to practitioners. The study was not sufficiently detailed; it was not designed to give us what we need. We need to understand what's going on at a micro level.
That is why the InterActive research is timely as it advances our understanding of what is happening at this level. We can look to the project to provide rich concrete examples of what happens when teachers, learners and technology interact. InterActive should also be able to shed a more focussed light on the nature of the interaction between home and school use of computers and other new technologies in learning. There are tensions building between learners' ability to define for themselves the out-of-school culture and the constraints of school culture which may not allow the learner to import and apply their skills. To avoid this tension we need to understand more about the relationship between self-directed and other-directed learning.
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