Francisco Javier Ramos-Pardo

The OLPC program, designed by a team at the MIT Media Lab, aimed to improve educational outcomes among low-income primary students around the world by providing affordable personal laptops. The government of Peru launched its national OLPC program in 2009 targeting the nations most impoverished regions. Improving learning outcomes was a critical goal considering that only 14% of second grade primary students met the national mathematics standard and 23% did so for reading in 2009. While similar initiatives were implemented worldwide, their long-term impacts remain underexplored. This study focuses on 531 public, multigrade, rural primary schools, assessing the program's impact on academic achievement and grade progression through 2019.

This paper examines a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in 531 rural primary schools, as implemented by the Peruvian government starting in 2009. We use administrative and survey data on academic achievement and grade progression through 2019 to estimate the long-run effects of educational technology on i) academic performance and grade progression in schools over time and ii) student trajectories as they progress from primary school to university. We find negative and significant effects on completing primary and secondary education on time but no effects on achievement. We find positive and significant impacts on students' computer skills but no effects on broader cognitive skills. Information on teacher training and computer utilization suggests limited benefits of providing educational technology without sufficient pedagogical support.

This article aims to review what research has delved into the educational use of mobile phones during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thirty-eight papers indexed in the Journal Citation Reports database between 2020 and 2021 were analyzed to do this. These works were categorized into the following categories: the mobile phone as part of educational innovation, improvement of results and academic performance, positive attitude towards mobile phone use in education, and risks and/or barriers to mobile phone use. The conclusions show that most teaching innovation experiences focus more on the device than the student. Beyond its innovative nature, the mobile phone became a tool to allow access and continuity of training during the pandemic, especially in post-compulsory and higher education. For this reason, a positive attitude towards using mobile phones was also found in the analyzed papers among teachers and students. Finally, limitations and risks were found that must be considered in return to the "new normality". Este artículo persigue revisar qué investigaciones han profundizado sobre el uso educativo de teléfonos móviles durante la pandemia por COVID-19. Para ello, se analizaron un total de treinta y ocho artículos indexados en la base de datos Journal Citation Reports entre 2020 y 2021. Dichos trabajos fueron categorizados en las siguientes categorías: el teléfono móvil como parte de la innovación educativa, mejora de resultados y rendimiento académico, actitud positiva hacia el uso del teléfono móvil en educación y riesgos y/o barreras del uso del teléfono móvil. Las conclusiones muestran que la mayoría de las experiencias de innovación docente están centradas más en el dispositivo que en el estudiante. Más allá del carácter innovador, los teléfonos móviles se convirtieron en una herramienta para permitir el acceso y continuidad de la formación durante la pandemia, sobre todo en la educación postobligatoria y superior, por lo que también se ha encontrado una actitud positiva hacia el uso de móviles en los trabajos analizados entre el profesorado y el alumnado. Por último, se encontraron limitaciones y riesgos que deben ser tenidos en cuenta en la vuelta a la “nueva normalidad”.

The inclusion and use of mobile phones in education is subject to two opposing arguments, one which defends and the other which opposes their use. This work has undertaken a systematic revision of scientific production to guide researchers in their enquiries into this subject. To achieve this, a total of 60 articles indexed to the Journal Citation Reports database between the years 2011 and 2020 have been analysed. These have been categorised in six specific areas: attitude and relationship with the mobile phone, communication, educational applications and classroom interventions, tension between agents, relationship between use and performance and problems deriving from their use. The conclusions of the analysis made show that, in general, scientific production would seem to back the introduction of mobile phones in classrooms as beneficial for educational purposes provided that certain preliminary work is carried out and a certain development is achieved of the digital and media skills of both students and teaching staff.

Introducción: Los mensajes sobre el uso pedagógico de los móviles en el aula generan debate en las redes sociales y logran crear opinión en la ciudadanía. Los objetivos de este trabajo son: analizar las características de los discursos que se difunden en Facebook y Twitter sobre el uso educativo de los móviles en el aula, según si los argumentos que defienden se basan en la promoción, la prohibición o la indeterminación, e identificar los perfiles de sus principales agentes emisores, así como el tipo de contenido argumental de los mensajes que tienen mayor impacto. Metodología: Se plantea un estudio descriptivo transversal. Se analizan 142 mensajes en español o inglés, sin excluir su procedencia geográfica, desde una aproximación mixta empleando el criterio de engagement para clasificar su relevancia. Resultados: Los resultados muestran que la argumentación predominante es la de la promoción del uso educativo de móviles en el aula siendo los profesionales de la educación quienes mayoritariamente la publican. Los argumentos de prohibición son emitidos principalmente por los medios de comunicación y los perfiles institucionales, siendo estos mensajes los que tienen mayor repercusión. Discusión: Teniendo en cuenta que el liderazgo informal generado en las redes sociales puede provocar cambios en la agenda social y/o política, se destaca la relación hallada entre el tipo de usuario y el tipo de mensaje emitido. Conclusiones: Entre otras, se observa que las críticas y recelos al uso de los móviles en el aula se deben a la confusión generalizada entre móviles y redes sociales.

Este trabajo propone repensar la educación para la ciudadanía a través de una ruptura con las estructuras normativas impuestas (patriarcales, coloniales, clasistas u otras) con el fin de atender a las demandas y retos de las sociedades plurales y diversas. Se realiza una revisión teórica del concepto de ciudadanía y se sientan las bases para construir un marco epistemológico antihegemónico dentro de las pedagogías críticas decoloniales y feministas en la formación del profesorado.

Is a school's impact on high-stakes test scores a good measure of its overall impact on students? Do parents value school impacts on high-stakes tests, longer-run outcomes, or both? To answer the first question, we apply quasi-Experimental methods to data from Trinidad and Tobago and estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. Schools' impact on high stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on low-stakes tests, dropout, crime, teen motherhood, and formal labor market participation. To answer the second question, we link estimated school impacts to parent's ranked lists of schools and employ discrete choice models to estimate parental preferences. Parents value schools that causally improve high-stakes test scores conditional on average outcomes, proximity, and peer quality. Consistent with parents valuing the multi-dimensional output of schools, parents of high-achieving girls prefer schools, parents of high-achieving girls prefer schools that increase formal labor market participation, and parents of high-achieving boys prefer schools that reduce arrests.

Knowledge is transferred between firms explicitly or tacitly. While non-embedded knowledge can be transferred explicitly through patent citations, embedded knowledge is essentially transferred tacitly through knowledgeable workers’ movements. Given the higher prevalence of the latter, improved matching and allocation efficiency gains due to workers’ displacement can exert relevant impact on a firm’s performance and on economic growth. This paper explores knowledge spill overs across firms occurring due to displacement of workers who transit from better to less performing firms. Allegedly, workers who move from more successful firms carry with them some knowledge of the technology that induces improvements of performance in the recipient firms. Different measures of firms’ performance are studied (proxies for firms’ productivity such as average quality of labor workforce and estimated TFP per firm). Discrimination according to sector of sending and recipient firms (R&D intensive or not) and type of moving worker (scientific or not) is taken into consideration to differentiate results. Matched employer-employee administrative records of the Peruvian formal sector allow to control for several time varying observables and time invariant non-observables on both ends (firms and workers). Preliminary findings of this paper suggest that spillovers exist, that is, recipient firms improve performance after receiving workers from better performing firms. This happens with more intensity for workers transiting across firms of more than 50 workers, with higher educational levels, with occupations related to sciences, technology and engineering and in firms operating in more R&D oriented sectors.