CREDIT to classrooms: an evidence base for pedagogical development

Abstract

First paragraph: For some two decades now, the education system and its consumers, students and their parents, have been assailed with all manner of seductive endorsements and imperatives to use computers in learning and teaching. Of the various claims made, the least convincing are to be found in the futuristic promotional literature of the many commercial interests, some of whom brazenly hail the teacher-less school or university as the ultimate and inevitable outcome of current ‘progress'. More compelling, however, is the influence that informed argument from academia and government has on the expectations of students. Few would dispute the view that computers can enhance learning in many ways (the view endorsed by academia) or that students should develop the key skills associated with technology usage regardless of the phase of education they are in (the view of successive governments and given consistent endorsement in the various curriculum and system reviews, e.g. Dearing, 1996 and Dearing, 1997).