January 1996 — Features
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Use of Computers at High Schools in Turkey
Computer penetration in high schools remains extremely low and computers-to-pupil ratios are discouragingly high (100:1). In this respect, Turkey lags significantly behind most comparator and 'ECD countries.
Courses for computer-literacy, high-level programming and the use of databases and spreadsheets have been appended to vocational and technical high schools' curriculum. Their contents are in the process of being updated. In regular high schools, courses on computer-literacy and general computing are being introduced.
The M'E is also building a portfolio management information system linking 73 regional education directorates' offices with the centre in Ankara to provide information on personnel, infrastructure, educational statistics and facilities. It should greatly assist strategic planning.
General Assessment of Today
In 1988 the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) enumerated five reasons why computers should be used in education:[8]
- To individualize instruction;
- To contribute to learning mastery;
- To make higher quality material available more widely; and
- To stimulate educational reform.
Although the main project in Turkey was called a CAE project, it has only been able to achieve a minimum subset of IFIP's reasoning for the use computers in education. It is hard to describe it as computer-aided education.
One strategy has been to utilise the secondary schools as intermediaries for diffusion of computer skills. But it is far removed from producing the computer-literate workforce originally conceived.
The limited type of computer courses introduced can only encourage a relatively low percentage of pupils at high schools and only in limited use. Integration of computer-aided education into the curriculum has not been achieved.
As yet, the types of software being used do not complement any of the other courses in the curriculum such as physics, chemistry, etc. Thus the initial aim of employing computers as one tool to compensate for poor quality and persistent deficiencies of teachers has not been fulfilled either.
There is virtually no software available for use in high school education that uses the interactive multimedia technology that best serves individual learning needs.
In all these issues it appears that poor planning for CAE has played an important negative role. The need to train teachers at teacher education colleges and the need for inservice was discovered rather late.
