Abstract:

The Center for Information Technology Innovation (CITI) for Human Development, at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (AUI) is conducting a three year project sponsored by the Korean Agency KOIKA, to investigate the impact of introducing IT based education on the performance of students in the mathematics, physics, and earth and life sciences disciplines in the seventh, eigth and nineth levels/grades in middle schools in Morocco.
In order to gage the impact of ICT(Information and Communication Technologies) on Mathematics and the Sciences, we designed a nested experiment where we have chosen, as pilot/experimental sites, two middle schools located in two different cities, namely Alarz middle school in the city Ifrane and Kassem Amine Middle in the city of Fez. Both middle schools have been equipped with one ICT enabled classroom with a capacity of 20 students.
We have worked with instructors from both middle schools and pedagogical inspectors designed by the ministry of education to develop and validate numeric contents, conform to the official educational middle school programs, to be used in our experiment for the three levels and disciplines under investigation.
In each middle school and for each of the three levels, we have worked with the respective school directors to form two groups of twenty students each representing the population of students. One of the two groups will serve as the experimental group and the other one as the control group.
We have also identified an instructor per discipline per level in each middle school to teach the course to the experimental group using ICT based content and to the control group using the traditional approach.
For the three middle school levels, the performance of the experimental and control groups in each discipline in both middle schools was assessed using the same examinations.
After a careful evaluation of the possible ways of designing, planning and running this experiment, we have adopted for a general balanced 4-stage nested design. The chosen design allows comparing the impact of ICT-based education across the three disciplines, and across the three middle school levels and across the two pilot middle schools. It should be noted that we have controlled the impact of the instructor competencies, examination structure and representativeness of the samples of students forming the experimental and control groups.
In this paper we give a detailed explanation of how we designed, planned and carried this experiment. We also give the results of the analysis and shed some light on the obstacles encountered and the lessons learned and give recommendations to carrying similar experiments.

Keywords:

it based education, math and science education, experimental design, nested.