Technology Implementation in the VUCA Era: Insights from Large-scale International Assessment Studies

Overview

Students of today’s generation have been immersed in tablets, smartphones and different forms of digital media from a very early age. The rapid advent of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the past two decades has disrupted the world in the ways that people live and interact with one another. ICT is so pervasive that it has become an integral part of our daily-life and one of the key vehicles for driving economic development and leveraging academic attainments.

Harnessing new technologies are considered pivotal to education quality, equality, inclusion and life-long learning for all. It is anticipated that the use of ICT helps connect learning across formal and informal contexts in a seamless way. As such, this global phenomenon has spawned a proliferation of research studies on ICT implementation in schools in the past two decades. Nonetheless, the impact of ICT use on students’ academic achievements has been equivocal. Large-scale studies on technology integration and student achievements, such as SITES, TIMSS, PISA and PIRLS, have yielded ambivalent results. ICT implementation in school has long been seen as a complex process. From an ecological perspective of ICT implementation, the impact of ICT on student learning hinges on a myriad of variables at the student, school and country levels.

In this presentation, by drawing upon the PISA datasets, the speaker will attempt to unfold the ambivalent relationship between students’ ICT use and their academic achievements, which to shed more light on technology implementation in the VUCA era.