Tablets in education. Results from the initiative ETiE, for teaching plants to primary school students

Emerging Technologies (ETs) in Education: A Systematic Review of the Literature Published between 2006 and 2016

“…Figure 4 shows the educational context of the 288 articles. As shown in Figure 4, 66.3% of the studies have their context of application in higher education and correspond to undergraduate, specializations, masters and doctorates (e.g., [41]); 20.5% are general context, meaning that their objectives and results can be used at any educational level (e.g., [53]); 9.7% are from the context of secondary education and belong to levels from high school to k-12 (e.g., [19]); 1.4% corresponds to the context of primary (pre-school, first, second, third, fourth and fifth education) (e.g., [9]); additionally, the 1.4 % belongs to secondary and higher education (e.g., [25]) and 0.7% between primary and secondary education (e.g., [39]). The latter two percentages mean that the affected population is from both types.…”

“…37 studies were found in design. 78.4% were designed to implement and evaluate the different strategies used to incorporate different ETs in the classroom (e.g., [19]), 16.2% only designed the incorporation strategy, 2.7% designed and implemented a strategy but did not evaluate it (e.g., [21]) and 2.7% designed a strategy which was not implemented but it was evaluated from the perspectives of a participant of the educative process (e.g., [22]). …”

“…Finally, other authors mentioned that ETs should be accessible, functional, easy to use and interactive to achieve changes in the classroom; and regardless of the ETs, these should generate: motivation [32]; Reflection [37]; Interaction [49]; Autonomy [19]; Feedback [42]; Improvement of competencies [39] in the educational context.…”

“…This does not mean that the issue is already solved. On the contrary, due to the social and technological changes it is necessary to continue investigating on the incorporation of ET in educational processes, either with the achieved goals or new ones as: generate new teaching methods [19]; design strategies for TE incorporation [29]; Develop new assessment tools [63]; generalize more the findings in different studies [16] among others. However, regardless of the purpose of the study, everyone should aim for good quality education for all.…”

“…In the quantitative research, the experimental method was the most widely used, because it allowed researchers to compare between: conventional teaching methodologies and teaching methodologies using ET (e.g., [19]); Groups exposed to an ET and not exposed (e.g., [23]) and between conventional and ET technologies (e.g., [66]), one of the advantages of using the experimental method is that it allows researchers and teachers to determine whether the design and implementation of the strategy produces significant changes in the groups and thus, establish whether the incorporation of ET improves or not the educational processes through the use of statistics.…”