Category Archives: Education and Content

Nancie Severs on the recent OLPC Help Sprint!

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Nancie wrote up her week visiting Boston to work on the updated Help activity, in her travel blog:

Last October at the San Francisco [OLPC] Volunteer Summit, plans for the Refresh-Help project evolved. This week in Boston, here we are! The details can be found on the wiki. Adam Holt (OLPC & Haiti), and volunteers Christoph Derndorfer (Vienna), George Hunt (engineering & School Server expert) Mark Battley (Toronto/Kenya), Craig Perue, (Jamaica), Laura de Reynal France/NosyKomba, Harriet V (India). Sandra Thaxter (MA/Kenya) Ed C (Indiana), Sameer (OLPC-SF & Jamaica), and locals Bernie, Dogie, SJ and others worked and played together at the Cambridge OLPC offices to try and get this project done! Chief organizer Caryl Bigenho was busy helping remotely most of the time. There were other folks around the globe furiously writing and editing too.

Thanks for all who helped out! We still need people to help finish packaging the result into a new Help.xo activity, and translate the result into Spanish.

IDB’s Eugenio Severin on learning from Peru’s OLPC experience

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The lead author of the detailed IDB study from Peru, released earlier this year, has published a good summary of their work and its implications. He highlights the tremendous efforts of Peru’s government for supporting the research and data-gathering, which will help not only Peru’s education work but that of other countries following in their footsteps.  And he groups the outcome into four key results:

  1. major change in access to knowledge, and reduction of the digital divide,
  2. improvement of cognitive skills, across many different tests
  3. no change in standardized tests for math and reading
  4. no change in school enrollment and attendance.

You can read the essay on the IDB blog.  An excerpt:

It is very important to commend the efforts of the Peruvian government for doing a serious evaluation of this program, and for sharing their results so transparently. It is a fact that there are few impact evaluations on the use of technology in education. Therefore, any contribution of knowledge helps support the efforts of many countries in the region and the world that are working to improve educational conditions for children that technologies can provide.

These are our results. First, the program has drastically reduced the digital divide, allowing many students and teachers, even in remote areas, to have access to laptops and educational content. Second, positive results were found in cognitive skills tests. The applied tests sought to measure reasoning abilities, verbal fluency, and processing speed in children. The very results are important, as they have been shown to be predictors of academic and work performance. The results indicate that children who received a laptop got ahead by 5 months of what the natural progression would have been in the development of these skills when compared to children who did not receive a laptop. Third, after 15 months of implementation, we found no statistically significant differences between children in beneficiary schools and children in control schools on learning outcomes measured by standardized tests of mathematics and language. No differences were found in relation to school enrollment and attendance.

Nicholas on Peru

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Giving a poor child in a remote Peruvian village
a laptop to own and take home, is giving that
child hope, self-esteem, and an opportunity to
learn outside, as well as inside school. The
Economist did not read the full Inter-American
Development Bank report, that noted: “Students
also demonstrated increased cognitive abilities
from the OLPC program.”

The purpose of OLPC was not to improve classroom
learning only, but learning in the child’s whole
life. Ironically, Peru is the country where we most
encounter 6-to-10-year olds teaching their parents
how to read and write… I do not have a better story.
Furthermore, reading comprehension, parent involvement,
and a passion for playing with ideas improved. Check
out Uruguay, if you want to find more rigorous
statistics of success from a better organized
rollout.

Lastly, think of the logic behind applying traditional
19th Century testing to modern learning, especially at
early ages. High test scores come from rote learning,
and do not evaluate critical and creative thinking,
initiative and discovery, let alone peer to peer
teaching. It is like using a pedometer to measure
the speed of a car. Error.

OLPC has nearly 3 million laptops in 40 countries
and 25 languages, after six years and almost $1
billion spent. Noone reading this would not give
their child a connected laptop if he or she could
afford one. Why is it so hard to understand that
poor children should get the same?

eduJAM! 2012 Call for Papers

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We invite the submission of papers to be presented at the eduJAM! 2012 summit. It will take place Friday-Saturday, May 11th-12th.

A summary of the main contributions from all the papers and the mention of the authors will be published on the event’s website and in the media after the summit. See more details in the document linked here and on our website.

Llamados a Ponencias – eduJAM! 2012

Invitamos a la presentación de ponencias que integrarán el Encuentro de Desarrolladores Uruguay: eduJAM! 2012 a desarrollarse el 11 y 12 de mayo. Un resumen de los principales aportes del conjunto de las ponencias y la mención a sus autores será publicado en la pagina del evento y en los medios de comunicación posteriormente al encuentro.
Mas detalles en el archivo aqui o en nuestra web.

Is traditional testing failing?

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The Economist recently published a brief and pessimistic summary of the IDB Peru study. Their writer looked only at standardized math and reading tests as measures of success, ignoring large improvements in cognitive skills. Or maybe, as Richard Jennings suggests, they didn’t read to the sixth sentence of the study:

picked up on a 40-day-old report from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and interpreted it as saying the program was failing in Peru. The anonymous Economist writer summarizes IDB’s findings thus:

GIVING a child a computer [does not] accomplish anything in particular… Peruvians’ test scores remain dismal. Only 13% of seven-year-olds were at the required level in maths and only 30% in reading… the children receiving the computers did not show improvement in maths… reading… motivation, or time devoted to homework or reading.

That’s depressing… I suppose there might be some intangible benefit, but it rather looks like there’s no quantitative gain.

But hang on a minute. It appears that The Economist has missed a key point from the report. IDB’s working paper, entitled Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program, also says:

The results indicate that the program… translated into substantial increases in use both at school and at home… Some positive effects are found… in general cognitive skills as measured by Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a verbal fluency test and a Coding test.

So, instead of a “disappointing return,” or “not accomplish[ing] anything in particular,” IDB did actually find a measurable benefit.

Could it be that the disparity between test scores and actual measured achievement means that it’s the tests that are lacking, rather than the laptops? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that academic testing was shown to be seriously wanting.

And is it too much to ask for The Economist’s journalists and fact-checkers to actually get as far as the sixth sentence in the report’s abstract, before writing the story? I know that many of today’s workers exhibit short attention-spans, but really!

Too right. Unlike traditional standardized tests, cognitive studies tests are more likely to demonstrate the sort of growth envisioned by constructionist approaches to learning: exploration, empowered learning, and creativity.

There were three separate cognitive skills tests measured by the IDB. All four showed large improvements – equivalent to 5-6 months of cognitive development. As the report notes, “these are sizable effects under this metric considering that the treatment group had an average exposure of 15 months” — that’s like getting an extra 3 years of cognitive development by the start of highschool; something worth further study.

IADB studies OLPC in Peru

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The Inter American Development Bank recently published the results of a study of the Peruvian schools that received OLPCs in rural primary schools in Peru, over the first 15 months of the program.

The methodology of the study was quite good, with a randomized study of over 300 schools.  But the measurements and focus were not aligned with the goals of Peru’s program, and there is no clear way to compare these results with the other detailed results available from Plan Ceibal’s program in Uruguay.  The after-analysis of their work has tended to focus on short-term math and reading results, whereas the goals of the program were access to knowledge, improvements in pedagogy, and access to computing – which might be expected to show up in the short term only in the abstract cognitive results.

The measured improvement in abstract thinking – roughly 5 additional months of cognitive development, over a 15-month period – is tremendous. It is interesting to note how this result is downplayed in parts of the world where schools live by less abstract standardized testing.

Some recent comments from OLPC staff and implementers, paraphrased for brevity:

Claudia Urrea:

‘The OLPC program in Peru, or any other place, has to be evaluated according to its initial goal. “math, language, and cognitive test results” showed outputs, but have no clear connection to Peru’s 2007 stated objectives, which targeted pedagogical training and application.’

Oscar Becerra, who oversaw OLPC in Peru’s government:

‘We succeeded in giving access to technology to 100% (220,000) of children and teachers at one-teacher schools, who otherwise would have had no opportunity to use ICT.  Most had the option to take laptops home with them.’

Oscar has published other comments that are a good representation of the OLPC perspective.