When educational results decline, there is a strong temptation to find a culprit.
In recent debates around the latest PISA results, smartphones and digital technologies have increasingly been placed at the centre of the explanation. More screens, we are told, mean less concentration, less reading and ultimately less learning.
But what if this is simply an easy explanation for a much more complicated problem?
A new study published in Nature offers an interesting reason to question the idea that technology itself is responsible for poorer educational outcomes. Researchers conducted five randomized trials involving 16,936 households in India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda. They used something that is often portrayed as the enemy of learning: a mobile phone. And it helped children learn.
The intervention connected primary-school children with tutors through weekly phone calls of around 20 minutes. Children also received text messages with learning activities.
The results were positive across all five countries. Overall, the phone-and-SMS programme produced learning gains more than three times larger than those usually found in education programmes. In other words, a short weekly phone call with a tutor made a surprisingly large difference. The gains were particularly striking in foundational mathematics. In Uganda, for example, only around 10% of fourth-grade children in the control group could solve division problems at the end of the study, compared with 48% of those receiving the intervention. Children also improved in areas that had not been directly taught, suggesting that the benefits extended beyond the specific exercises they practised.
Importantly, the technology was not the intervention by itself. What made the phone useful was what happened through it: regular contact, quality interactions and assessment.
The lesson from this research is therefore not that smartphones are good for children. It is that technology can become a powerful educational tool when it is designed around learning rather than around technology itself.
