Research Reviews

There have been many studies of the impact of ICT on learning performance from such leading international groups as BECTa, the US Department of Education, European Schoolnet , the European Commission and the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) at the OECD. No doubt there will be many more studies in the coming years. However, to date many of these studies about the impact on learning of the use of digital technologies have been general studies rather than specific to disciplines such as language, mathematics, science and so on. Perhaps the lack of specific studies has been because of the difficulty of developing a conceptual framework for assessing the effects of ICT in education. A publication recently released by the European Union and OECD begins to address these difficult questions. The book, freely available from the OECD Bookshop, Assessing the effects of ICT in education: Indicators, criteria and benchmarks for international comparisonsedited by Freidrich Scheuermann and Frances Pedró (2009) begins to address some of those difficult questions.