Where is the school laptops project leading us?

The national plan to provide primary school children with electronic gadgets to aid learning is going ahead, the procurement and distribution hiccups notwithstanding.

This forms the appropriate station for considering where this ambitious journey may lead the learners generally and the education system in particular.

Speaking to keen followers of education policy reform and a couple of teachers, it is evident that besides concentration on the provision of tablets or laptops, the policy goal being chased is less clear.

For instance, it will only be possible to assess the effect of the laptop policy if the goals of the initiative are spelt out in advance. It is clearer that the laptops and tablets will reach students in class but the picture of the result is less fluently stated.

It is useful to ask whether the intention is to improve learning outcomes for students, to reduce costs of delivery of textbooks or merely to foster familiarity with gadgets that will form an indispensable part of work in the future.

It is unclear whether this strong, expensive endeavor is driven by one large goal that could be measured in the future or not. In spite of my search on the Ministry of Education’s website on the date before this piece was published, I failed to find a document stating what the policy goals of the laptop or tablet project are.

NOT SHARED PUBLICLY

This not only suggests woolly thinking, but is also a bad sign for public policy because it shows that the justification will be provided after the purchase is complete or never at all. It is important that billions of taxpayer funds are spent on a project where the instruments are well defined, procured and near delivery, yet the goals are not set out or shared publicly.

The provision of laptops and learning gadgets to schoolchildren has been pursued by a number of comparable countries. In many cases, the rationale is to seek to improve learning outcomes by ensuring that school textbooks are available on the gadget. An added advantage is that the cost of purchasing these books may be reduced where they are available in digital form, with lower possibility of damage to the gadgets.

The more persuasive argument is that introduction of learners to computers and the information environment improves the learning of science and mathematics.

These hopes seem plausible when stated but the results of nearly a dozen evaluation studies show that mere access to a digital learning environment does not result in improved performance by the student. Instead, students at both primary and high school levels merely acquire competence in operating the machines.

If the purpose of this policy is to ensure that students learn and retain more knowledge, then the place to look is perhaps improving the quality of teachers and providing better facilities for learning.

NO EVIDENCE

All the pressure to provide infrastructure and ensure servicing of the gadgets once they reach the possession of young learners is justified. But there is no evidence in the literature that students will be the wiser and teaching will be improved owing to the provision of these gadgets.

Popular support for the laptops or tablets project also reflects a strong and enduring fallacy in public reasoning in Kenya. The error is that adoption of technology on its own delivers superior results hence every policy problem must have a cutting-edge technology product as a fix.

As Kenyans will find out regarding this project, the public policy landscape is not too different from business solutions because having high-powered instruments is hardly enough to meet challenges.

A strong argument can be sustained that if it were not for our entrancement with everything digital, we would find it more cost effective to use the money at hand to improve the teaching skills and overall training of teachers. The performance in school for most students will be determined to a large extent by the ability of the teacher and not the gadgets through which lessons are delivered.

Watching teachers during demonstration will convince some Kenyans that there's some work to do to raise the ability of teachers to deliver their lessons more effectively. It is clear that the digital gadgets policy for schools is not leading to that destination.