IMPACT OF ICT ON STUDENT ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS (EDUCATION PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the study
During the last two decades higher education institutions have invested heavily in information and communication technologies (ICT). ICT has had a major impact in the university context, in organisation and in teaching and learning methods.
One puzzling question is the effective impact of these technologies on student achievement and on the returns of education. Many academic researchers have tried to answer this question at the theoretical and empirical levels. They have faced two main difficulties. On one hand, student
performance is hard to observe and there is still confusion about its definition. On the other hand, ICT is evolving technologies and their effects are difficult to isolate from their environment.
There is no standard definition for student performance. The standard approach focuses on achievement and curricula, how students understand the courses and obtain their degrees or their marks. However, a more extensive definition deals with competencies, skills and attitudes learned through the education experience. The narrow definition allows the observation of the outcomes of any change in higher education, while the more extensive definition needs a more complex strategy of observation and a focus on the labour market. The outcomes of education are mainly validated in the labour market.
The impact of ICT on learning is currently in relation to use of digital media, primarily computers and internet to facilitate teaching and learning. ICTs are the technologies used in conveying, manipulation and storage of data by electronic means, they provide an array of powerful tools that may help in transforming the present isolated teacher-centered and text-bound classrooms into rich, student-focused, interactive knowledge environments.
To meet these challenges, learning institutions must embrace the new technologies and appropriate ICT tools for learning. The relationship between the use of ICT and student performance in higher education is not clear, and there are contradictory results in the literature. Earlier economic research has failed to provide a clear consensus concerning the effect on students’ achievement.
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IMPACT OF ICT ON STUDENT ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS (EDUCATION PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
