Research Reviews

The educational debate about the use of technology to improve learning performance, strangely, continues among policy makers even today. For example, a recent report that compared educational success in several countries, as measured by international tests, omitted the necessity and the benefits of using technology to improve student achievement. Such out-dated education reporting can be misleading for policy makers and educational leaders. A systemic review that synthesised the findings of over forty years of research has been recently made openly available by the American Educational Research Association in the Review of Educational Research. The study titled What Forty Years of Research Says About the Impact of Technology on Learning: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis and Validation Study quantitatively synthesised ‘findings from a number of meta-analyses addressing a similar research question’ (p. 6). The research question was ‘the effectiveness of computer technology use in educational contexts to answer the big question of technology’s impact on student achievement, when the comparison condition contains no technology use’ (p.6).