Computer Assisted Learning and Academic Performance in Rural Taiwan

Abstract

The objective of the current study is to examine the impact of an in-school computer-assisted learning (CAL) intervention on the math achievement of rural students in Taiwan, including a marginalized subgroup of rural students called Xinzhumin, and the factors associated with this impact. In order to achieve this, we conducted a cluster randomized controlled trial involving 1,840 fourth- and fifth-grade students at 95 schools in four relatively poor counties and municipalities of Taiwan during the spring semester of 2019. While the Intention-To-Treat (ITT) analysis found that the CAL intervention had no significant impacts on student math achievement, the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) analysis revealed significant associations with the math performance of the most active 20% of students in the treatment group. LATE estimates suggest that using CAL for more than 20 minutes per week for ten weeks corresponds to higher math test scores, both in general (0.16 SD–0.22 SD), and for Xinzhumin students specifically (0.3 SD–0.34 SD). Teacher-level characteristics were associated with compliance rates.

Keywords:

• Rural education
• educational policy
• education inequality
• educational development
• computer-assisted learning

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open Research Statement

This manuscript was not required to disclose open research practices, as it was initially submitted prior to JREE mandating open research statements in April 2022.

Notes

1 For more information about the specific CAL software used in this study, please see Appendix 7 and Appendix Figures 1 and 2.

2 Sessions of 30 minutes once per week were chosen for several reasons. First, the students were requested to use CAL software for one class period (40 minutes). This choice is based on previous research (Bai et al., 2023; Ma et al., 2020) which counted full compliance as one class period or two class periods. Second, since the software only records the time of doing math questions, and not log-in and log-out time, we use the 40-minute class period minus 10 minutes of log-in and log-out time to get 30 minutes of full compliance. Third, the study schools only wanted to implement this program once every week, so we followed this agreement as it had policy implications.

3 Student characteristics for matching included one child, gender, age, baseline standardized mathematics scores, parental education, parents’ living at home, mother is Taiwanese, private tutor, parental help on homework, using computer at home, like school Z score, like math Z score, and like math teacher Z score. Teacher characteristics for matching included teacher gender, teacher age, teacher education, teacher tenure, like work Z score, satisfied with income Z score, number of classes, number of tutoring classes, weekend workload, and homeroom workload.

4 The like work z score of teachers was also significantly positively correlated with software usage in minutes at the class level, demonstrating the additional robustness of this result.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Lee Family Foundation.