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The impact of ICTs on student performance: evidence from wifi and smartphones

In this talk I will discuss several papers looking at the effect of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on the performance of students in K-12 schools and in the University. In the first study, I will look at the effect of wi-fi connectivity on the scores obtained by students. I will use data from an engineering school covering 3 consecutive years and 10k students. I will show that on average wi-fi access improves performance and that this relationship exhibits the expected diminishing returns to scale. Using these data, I will also show heterogeneous peer effects. Namely, peers do not seem to have an effect on student performance for younger students but they do for older students. In the second study, I will show that smartphones can be used in the classroom to improve the performance of students. Using results from a randomized control trial covering about 400 students, I will show that banning smartphones from the classroom improves grades slightly but that using them as part of the learning process improves grades further. Finally, I will show that this result arises because of the learning productivity associated to using the smartphone in the classroom, which dominates the effect of increased distraction.