Students Who Are Tested in a Context Differing Significantly from their Instructional Environment Do Worse

Slashdot is running a story about a highly questionable research study:

The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today…. Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University.

While the report itself doesn’t seem to be available, I’m going to make a wild guess here: these tests were administered using #2 pencils and sheets of paper with many bubbles on them, which students diligently filled out.

Does no one else see the problem here? I would like to see the Telegraph article retitiled, “Students Who Are Tested in a Context Differing Significantly from their Instructional Environment Do Worse.” Why would we be shocked or surprised to find that kids who spend more time with paper and pencil outperform their high tech peers on paper and pencil tests??? If the tests had been administered on computers, which group would have been the top performer? As Paul Saffo famously said, “It’s the context, stupid.”

Yet another example of people with an agenda “doing research.” What an embarassment. No wonder educational research is completely discredited in the popular mind.