“Wouldn’t we all?” The sad fact is that there is no answer to that question, at least there is no one answer. What we do know, whether from personal experience as teacher or learner, or as the result of 20 years of research into the question, is that ICT has an impact on learning, for some learners, under some conditions, and that it cannot replace a teacher. We know that a key factor in impact at school level is and remains the teacher, whose role in managing and integrating the ICT-based experiences learners have with the rest of the curriculum and culture is vital and probably always will be.

It may seem appalling that given all the time and money invested in both installing ICT in the school system, and then researching its effects, that we apparently know so little about its impact. Or alternatively that its impact is so slight. But that is to miss the main point here. The problem with the big question - “what is the impact of ICT?” - is that it is the wrong question. It assumes that ICT is likely to produce a major identifiable and uniform effect on the performance of learners. After all, why would it? Why should activities as different as searching the web for content and, say, using a spreadsheet to investigate the relationship between acceleration and mass, have similar outcomes? And how do you aggregate those outcomes into a measure of “impact”? If we are to begin to understand the role of ICT better, there is a need to stop talking about ICT and break it down into meaningful subsets.

Large-scale studies have attempted to identify generic features of ICT which are likely to have relevance to teaching. The TTA-funded research carried out at Newcastle University by David Mosely, Steve Higgins and colleagues, offered these - feedback, dynamic representation and the ability to edit iteratively. Their work comprised a range of intervention studies where teachers used a variety of ICT-based tasks using these features, and monitored the effects on numeracy and literacy. There was an overall positive impact, but even then authors were reluctant to state that there was a definite causal relationship between this outcome and the use of the ICT.

The challenge for researchers is to look for measures of educational impact which capture the contribution that ICT makes to learning. Some may argue that this is pointless - that our culture is increasingly immersed in ICT and that this is reason enough to invest in it for schools. While I have some sympathy with this view, it begs the question of what schools should be doing with all this ICT? After all, the equipment schools have can be used in a range of ways, for a variety of purposes.

Currently the only measures which carry any weight in the school system are SATs and GCSE. Policy makers are looking for a return on investment in ICT in those terms. The question is, are those measures subtle enough to capture the effects of an ICT-rich learning environment, or are they in fact rewarding achievement which is directly opposed to the type of learning that ICT best supports?

Angela McFarlane is professor of education and director of learning technology at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol