Search

While infusion of technology into schools has been one of the top priorities of the education reform agenda across the world, findings from many large-scale international assessments indicate that students' use of information and communication technology (ICT) has mixed effects on their academic achievements. In this paper, we argue that these ambivalent findings were due to the oversight of the indirect effects of ICT use mediated by other ICT-related variables. We employed multilevel structural equation modelling to unfold the relationship between students' ICT use and their academic achievements based on PISA 2015 data. The results indicated that students' autonomy in ICT use and students' interest in ICT use were found to have significant positive direct effects on students' academic achievements at both within-school and between-school levels. These two variables played a significant role in mediating the indirect effects of ICT use outside school for schoolwork and ICT resources on students' academic achievements. On the contrary, ICT resources and ICT use at school exerted either no direct effect or a negative direct effect on students' academic achievements and students' perceived autonomy related to ICT use, suggesting that mere provision and use of ICT resources in school did not necessarily guarantee success in student performance. At the school level, school's transformational leadership and collaborative climate helped promote students' autonomy in ICT use.

FIBER (Flipped Issue-Based Enquiry Ride) is a teacher-facilitated interactive pedagogic framework that the authors propose to integrate flipped learning into social humanities education. This paper reports a quasi-experimental study (with mixed methods) which examined the pedagogic effectiveness of FIBER in the authentic setting of formal curriculum learning and teaching. The study involved totally 611 Secondary-4 students from academically top, middle and bottom schools in Hong Kong. In comparison with the conventional issue-based enquiry learning approach, FIBER had different intensity of positive effects on the high, moderate, and low academic-achieving student participants. This paper provides researchers and educational practitioners with empirical evidence for supporting wider adoption of FIBER in social humanities education, as well as harnessing flipped learning in formal schooling. Apart from discussing the benefits, the authors also underline the challenges of FIBER and suggest future work.

VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Environment) is a teacher-facilitated pedagogical approach to integrating constructivist online game-based learning into formal curriculum teaching in school education. This paper reports a case study on the implementation of VISOLE in secondary Geography education. We compared the pedagogical effectiveness of VISOLE and the traditional classroom teaching approach, in terms of students' knowledge acquisition with respect to a formal curriculum. One hundred and ninety-eight students from top, middle, and bottom academic-banding schools were selected and divided into three experimental groups and three control groups to participate in the research. Results showed that, in comparison with the traditional approach, VISOLE had a positive pedagogical effect on both low and moderate academic-achievement students, but not on high academic-achievement students. The findings shed light on enhancing the existing design of VISOLE, and provide researchers and educators with new insights into harnessing online games in formal school education in practice.