Abstract:

One major question arises concerning IT integration into teaching and learning practices: what student achievement outcomes can be expected? A metasynthesis of 55 research reports on experiments conducted in the college network in the Canadian province of Quebec showed that researchers took an interest in three interconnected dimensions of student achievement in the context of technology-rich environments and blended courses: students’ grades, deep learning and motivation. The metasynthesis, carried out by the Association pour la recherche au collegial (ARC), is an ongoing project that started in 2004 and covers a body of reports that were published between 1985 and 2012.

Through a methodology that searches for co-occurrences of characteristics of experiments in IT integration and their impacts on these three different dimensions of student achievement, the metasynthesis has shed light on some interesting facts. First and foremost is that in the experiments reviewed, deep learning appears to be what benefits the most, while students’ grades were not shown to have as positive an impact. An interesting question arising from this discrepancy is the extent to which student evaluation attempts to take deep learning into account. Also noteworthy are the combinations of factors or conditions present in those experiments that led to pronounced positive impacts on student learning. Many of the conditions are related to the quality of the pedagogical design of the activities: teaching/learning approaches and methodologies, roles that teachers and students are called on to play during the activities, evaluation methods. Other conditions derive from the nature of the technologies involved: self-testing exercises or quizzes, tutorials with informative feedback, collaborative platforms. Still other conditions are those set by the organizational environment: direct technological infrastructure and support, educational counselling, training. Systematic co-occurences of conditions have been observed, resulting in the establishment of rules to be applied if one is to maximize the impacts of IT integration. For example, it is well established that positive impacts of students’ grades are observed at the end of activities that are well planned, are carried out in the classroom or online for a short time, are based on sound technology, are motivating and combine collaborative work and deep learning. Rules like this are tremendously useful to teachers and educational counsellors alike who are drawn to experiments on IT integration into teaching and learning, because they set guidelines for maximizing the desired effects.

Keywords:

Student achievement, outcomes, IT integration, teaching and learning, metasynthesis, research.